Featured EFI Provider: Volt Telecom Group

EFI is only part of what the Volt Telecom Group does - they also offer a full spectrum of services in engineering, construction, maintenance, and staffing to a world-wide client base.

Volt brings a remarkable depth of experience to these activities. The company's heritage - and some of its employees - go back to the days of Western Electric and the Bell System.

Volt's experience shows in its systematic roll-outs, where no more than three days is devoted to installation on a single site.

"Each site we work in, we figure you should be there two days, three days maximum, to mount, install, get the alarms rolled up and test," said Chet Kowalczyk, alarm services engineer. "We've gotten pretty smart about it. We'll send in two guys, they'll start together, and then one moves on to the next site while the other finishes up the first. We take it in stages, and we're not killing time that way."

But moving through installations quickly takes advanced preparation, according to Volt telemetry manager Anthony Frascino.

"There's a trend in the amount of time it takes to do an installation, as long as we have all the information we need. We can estimate how long the job will take when we knew what equipment we would install and how long it would take to install it," Frascino said.

Frascino said that the preparatory information is gathered from purchase orders, site diagrams, and site surveys. Sometimes the site diagrams don't correspond to the actual site - understandable in large networks - and the Volt team adjusts their plans accordingly.

Quality, as well as speed, is Volt's primary concern. "The biggest issue is quality. You need to get the job done quickly and on time, but you've got to keep up with the quality," said Frascino.

"We've been ISO 9000 certified for a while, and we were TL 9000 certified just recently. There's a whole process of quality control that I was involved in creating. All of our guys are trained on the procedure, and the procedures are all listed on an internal website that installers can access from anywhere," said Frascino.

Frascino, who is in charge of overall management of telemetry installation projects, said he relishes the challenges of the job. "I think a lot about getting my guys across the country and getting the job done in the time we have to do it. Making sure it gets done right so we don't have to go back and fix it. I love my job. It's kind of like playing chess."