Scaling Drone Operations Without Compromising Compliance.
Mitra AI enables Openreach to streamline CAA regulatory management and accelerate network delivery with a purpose-built digital platform.
About Openreach
Openreach Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group, is responsible for running the UK’s physical network infrastructure. Established in 2006, they maintain the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets, and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone networks. Openreach’s customers are the 690+ communications providers who sell phone, broadband and Ethernet services to homes and businesses across the UK. With a workforce of over 35,000, they tackle complicated engineering problems, installing and maintaining the complex kit that delivers fibre broadband services, as well as coordinating works with councils, highways agencies, energy suppliers and landowners.
Opportunity
Maintaining the UK’s national communications network requires safe, efficient, and compliant operations at scale. Openreach adopted drone technology to accelerate infrastructure surveys, inspections at height, and overhead fibre deployment—reducing delivery time while significantly improving engineer safety.
As drone usage expanded, however, the administrative burden of meeting strict Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulations grew rapidly. Each flight required extensive pre-flight checks and approvals, on-site assessments, post-flight data capture and spent hours reporting, ongoing oversight of pilots, flying hours, aircraft, and certifications and audit and investigative requirements to fulfill CAA regulations. These activities generated large volumes of compliance data, captured across disconnected forms and documents. As adoption scaled, this fragmented and manual approach increased compliance risk, consumed valuable engineering time, and threatened to slow operational productivity and network rollout.
Solution
Openreach researched commercially available Drone Management Systems, but found them over complex, difficult to use and expensive for what was required. They approached Mitra AI to build a simple “one stop” web application that could be accessed by engineers via their existing devices i.e. Openreach smartphones and laptops.
Mitra AI leveraged its low-code platform to create and configure an app that captures all the information required across all the tasks in a simple, linear and consistent format. The app also provides an individual pilot flight log and history as required by the CAA.
A management dashboard gives oversight of pilots, flights and drones and the data can easily be shared, by exporting files as PDFs as required for the CAA. Mitra AI built the prototype based on lowcode technology, ensuring fast development time, and the flexibility to adapt to new use cases and add new features, tasks and process steps when required. The prototype became a minimum viable product(MVP) and operational across Openreach.
Impact
"It has been a pleasure working with the Mitra team. The ability to have a dashboard custom-built to provide a top-level view for our pilots as well as a web-app for the pilots to be able to record their flights, has proved extremely useful."
Adam Noyce
Open Innovation and Communications, Openreach