[NTT WEST]Field Assistant Midori Ippai Project Activities Annual Environmental Report NTT WEST - Telecommunications and ICT Services and Solutions

Field Assistant Field Assistant

NTT Fieldtechno, a company under NTT West Group, has been providing repair services and support as a community-based "life partner" for telecommunications infrastructure such as telephones and optical fiber networks.

The "Field Assistant" service offered by the company shows an integrated display on the map screen that contains information on the current location of different project tasks and engineers as well as the skills and equipment that the engineers have, thus enabling the supervisor in charge to allocate personnel intuitively at real time.

Also, work performed by a worker is automatically accumulated in the server and all types of information needed for adjustment and making judgment are consolidated in the dashboard of Field Assistant, allowing a wide variety of information to be determined instantly.

Using "Field Assistant" helps to reduce CO₂ emission by 38t-CO₂/year (37%) (*) compared to the conventional means. The largest contributing factor of CO₂ emission is manual work, and using the Field Assistant feature that allows the work records of workers to be accumulated automatically in the server contributes most significantly to the environment.

Utilizing this service allows work allocation to workers to be performed more efficiently and helps to reduce CO₂ emission arising from human labor.
*To offset the amount of CO₂ naturally, it is necessary to plant approximately 8.5ha of trees, an area that is equivalent to about 2.5 times that of Kyocera Dome Osaka (area: 33,765.82m2).

Field Assistant

Voices of Our Staff

NTT Fieldtechno
Plant Department, Planning Unit
ICT Strategy Promotion Office
Kenji Tanaka

In order to allow intuitive assignment of on-site workers, Field Assistant is also equipped with an "Optimal Routing Engine" that makes use of AI to "visualize" the location and progress of workers and project tasks on a map and suggest the optimal combination based on a skill database that accumulates the empirical values, schedule, travel distance and other information.
In the past, supervisors in charge would receive a large number of project tasks and assign workers based on their own knowledge and familiarity with the locations. By displaying information of the on-site workers, project tasks and equipment on a map, it is possible for supervisors to assign workers efficiently even if they are not extremely familiar with the area they are in charge of.

Besides grasping the progress, it is also possible to display hazard information on blocked passageways during a disaster, for example, thus allowing follow-up actions to ensure the safety of the on-site workers. Not only so, skills and empirical values can also be managed to enable systematic training of the on-site workers.
Supervisors in charge have given positive feedback on the ability for them to grasp the status of the on-site workers visually and respond quickly to unexpected tasks such as when offering work support. While the plans proposed by AI still lack precision, some are hopeful that the precision will improve as learning by AI progresses.

Currently, efforts to "achieve zero and proactiveness" are ongoing to enhance the efficiency of on-site work using AI and ICT. "Achieving zero" refers to efforts to reduce the amount of time and support work needed per task by having AI provide recommendations during the work based on past repair cases and knowledge that have been accumulated so as to shorten the time needed to recover from a failure. Meanwhile, "achieving proactiveness" refers to efforts to carry out maintenance systematically by utilizing AI and ICT to detect symptoms prior to the occurrence of troubles.
We will strive to expand the features further, such as by linking them to our in-house system, and continue to make refinements and improvements to enhance work efficiency.