Continuous Improvement, Scalability & Innovation: The TowerCo Journey with Shapemaker

In today’s rapidly evolving telecom landscape, TowerCos are under immense pressure to do more with less. As they scale their operations across thousands of sites, complexity increases—maintaining infrastructure, ensuring compliance, managing costs, and staying ahead of unpredictable maintenance needs becomes a complex task. Traditional, manual processes introduce inefficiencies that make it challenging to keep pace with industry demands.

Shapemaker is designed to change this. By streamlining the entire lifecycle of tower management—from design and data onboarding to predictive maintenance and sustainability optimization—Shapemaker empowers TowerCos to operate more efficiently, predict and prevent costly repairs, and enable data-driven decisions. In this blog, we’ll explore a typical TowerCo’s customer journey with Shapemaker and show how this innovative solution is reshaping the telecom infrastructure landscape.

The TowerCo Challenge

Before partnering with Shapemaker, TowerCos often encounter significant obstacles:

• Data Overload and Manual Processes: Vast amounts of tower data are scattered across multiple systems, leading to time-consuming manual entry, reconciliation, and analysis.
• Unplanned Downtime and Maintenance Costs: Without predictive maintenance, unexpected equipment failures result in expensive repairs and prolonged downtime.
• Scaling Operations: As TowerCos expand their portfolios, the increasing number of towers becomes more complex to manage efficiently.
• Sustainability Pressure: Meeting environmental targets requires reducing material use and improving energy efficiency, both of which are difficult to achieve without proper analytics.

Shapemaker software is offering a new approach to address these challenges at this critical juncture.

Overview of the TowerCo Journey with Shapemaker

The TowerCo journey with Shapemaker is a transformative process, guiding companies from recognizing inefficiencies to scaling operations with unparalleled efficiency and sustainability. Each step—Awareness, Consideration, Benchmarking, Decision, Integration, Advocacy, Usage, and Expansion—represents a critical phase in optimizing telecom infrastructure management. These steps are explored in detail throughout this blog, showcasing how Shapemaker empowers TowerCos to achieve their goals.

Step 1: Awareness – Recognizing the Need for Optimization

The customer journey begins when TowerCos acknowledges the inefficiencies in their current processes. Reliance on manual data entry, time-consuming analyses, and reactive maintenance practices creates long-term sustainability and growth challenges. TowerCos realizes that a data-driven, automated solution is essential for streamlining their operations and improving decision-making.

Key metrics that drive this awareness:

• Up to 50% of operational costs are tied to engineering analysis, maintenance, repairs, and emergency site visits.
• Approximately 15-20% of downtime is caused by preventable infrastructure failures.

Step 2: Consideration – Exploring Shapemaker’s Platform

Recognizing the need for change, TowerCos explore Shapemaker’s cloud-based, data-driven platform. Its comprehensive features offer a unique approach to managing and optimizing telecom infrastructure.

Standout features:

• Automated Data Onboarding: Shapemaker automatically imports data from existing, API-based systems, minimizing manual workloads and reducing data errors.
• Automated Site-Specific Analysis: The platform delivers granular insights by analyzing wind exposure, topography, and other local conditions.
• Automated Structural Analysis and Reporting: Shapemaker rapidly conducts structural assessments and produces detailed reports and drawings in minutes.
• Predictive Maintenance: Leveraging real-time data, Shapemaker forecasts maintenance needs, reducing unplanned downtime and trimming maintenance costs by 20-30%.
• Sustainability Optimization: Design tools help lower material usage by up to 15%, meeting sustainability goals while cutting capital expenditures (CAPEX).

Step 3: Benchmarking – Ensuring Engineering Accuracy

As TowerCos continue to leverage Shapemaker’s insights, one critical aspect is validating the accuracy and reliability of engineering results. Shapemaker’s benchmarking capabilities enable TowerCos to compare modeled outcomes against real-world performance, ensuring the platform’s calculations align with established industry standards and on-site measurements.

Key Benefits:

• Data-Driven Validation: Shapemaker’s algorithms are continuously refined through feedback loops, incorporating real-world data to enhance predictive accuracy.
• Standards Compliance: Regular benchmarking ensures that designs, load calculations, and structural assessments adhere to industry regulations and engineering best practices.
• Confidence in Decision-Making: By routinely verifying results, TowerCos gain confidence that every analysis—from structural integrity checks to sustainability estimates—is grounded in validated engineering principles.

This step empowers TowerCos to trust their data, knowing that each insight derived from Shapemaker is backed by rigorous benchmarks, ultimately paving the way for more informed, reliable, and forward-thinking infrastructure decisions.

Step 4: Decision – Onboarding with Shapemaker

After evaluating the platform, TowerCos will commit to implementing Shapemaker. During onboarding, Shapemaker’s automated data import ensures accurate tower data integration, dramatically shortening the time needed to get operations running within the system.

Example: For a TowerCo managing 1,000 towers, Shapemaker’s automation reduces the onboarding process from weeks to days. This 50x improvement in analysis speed enables managing more towers with fewer resources.

Step 5: Integration – Establishing a Unified Data Source

After deciding to onboard with Shapemaker, TowerCos often leverage its APIs to integrate their existing Portfolio Management Platforms directly into the software. This step ensures that all tower-related information—historical data, current operational metrics, and future projections—resides in a single, centralized platform.

Key Benefits:

• One Source of Truth: By integrating Portfolio Management Systems and other external databases into Shapemaker, TowerCos maintain consistent, accurate, and up-to-date information across all stakeholders.
• Streamlined Workflows: Automated data synchronization removes the need for manual data handling, freeing teams to focus on strategic decision-making rather than administrative tasks.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Centralizing data within Shapemaker fosters clear communication and coordination between engineering, operations, finance, and leadership teams, ensuring everyone works from the same information.

Step 6: Usage – Leveraging Shapemaker’s Business Intelligence

Once data is onboarded TowerCos uses Shapemaker’s platform to generate detailed reports, conduct structural analyses, and predict maintenance needs. This comprehensive visibility transforms their approach to tower management.

Metrics after implementation:

• Improvement in tower uptime due to predictive maintenance and early issue detection.
• Extension in tower lifespan through optimized maintenance schedules and proactive repairs.
• Standardized reporting across all sites, improving compliance and decision-making.
• Enhanced sustainability enabling TowerCos to measure and reduce environmental impact through a smarter engineering design approach.

Step 7: Expansion – Scaling Operations with Shapemaker

Impressed by the initial results, TowerCos may expand their use of Shapemaker. They onboard more towers, explore additional features and establish Shapemaker as a strategic partner in their infrastructure management ecosystem.

Outcome:

• Reduced Operational Costs: Overall maintenance costs decrease by 15-20%, thanks to automation and predictive maintenance.
• Portfolio Scalability: Thousands of towers can be managed efficiently, reducing reliance on manual interventions.
• Sustainability Gains: Using 10-20% less material per tower aligns with global sustainability objectives and lowers environmental footprints.
• Faster response time: With beautiful visualizations and 50x faster analysis speed, response time will significantly decrease on third-party antenna installation requests.

Why Shapemaker?

Shapemaker is more than just a software tool,—it’s a platform that enables TowerCos to operate more efficiently, eliminate guesswork, and drive meaningful results. By automating key processes and providing actionable insights, Shapemaker empowers TowerCos to focus on growth, customer satisfaction, and environmental responsibility.

Ready to Transform Your Tower Management?

Join the growing number of TowerCos revolutionizing their operations with Shapemaker. Contact us today to learn how our platform can streamline data onboarding, reduce maintenance costs, and help you achieve your sustainability goals. Together, let’s shape the future of telecom infrastructure.

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With Shapemaker, the TowerCo customer journey becomes one of continuous improvement, scalability, and innovation.

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