Why Stratum
Most Drone Companies Deliver Photos After a Flight. Stratum Runs Recurring Programs That Feed Your Maintenance Workflow.
Owner-operated. Northeast Ohio based. Built around scheduled inspection cycles, severity-rated findings, and CMMS-ready work orders — not commodity flights and PDF reports.
Differentiators
What Sets Us Apart
Recurring Programs, Not One-Off Flights
Stratum sells inspection programs on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual cadence. The same crew, the same severity framework, the same CMMS handoff every cycle — so condition data is comparable across time and decisions are defensible across budget cycles.
Owner-Operated, Northeast Ohio Accountability
Stratum is owner-operated and based in Northeast Ohio. You work directly with the person responsible for the program — not a national platform's account manager and a rotating roster of subcontractors. One scope, one timeline, one point of accountability.
CMMS-Native Delivery
Other providers hand you a PDF. Stratum delivers structured findings tiered to the program: a CSV/PDF deliverable in Essential Asset Watch, a CMMS-ready import file in Critical Asset Assurance, and a direct API or managed feed in the Reliability Program — mapped to your asset hierarchy, work order schema, and classification codes. No manual re-entry. No copy-paste from reports.
Trend Data Across Cycles
Because every cycle uses the same severity framework and asset references, condition history actually trends. You can see degradation across quarters and years, defend capital requests with comparable data, and stop relying on memory of what last year's report said.
Program Continuity
Stratum runs the asset register, the cadence, and the CMMS pipeline. Subsequent cycles flow through the established program — no re-onboarding, no re-mapping, no rebuilding the integration. The program scales with your portfolio without rework each year.
Enterprise Systems DNA
Stratum's principal comes from 20+ years of ERP and CMMS implementation — Microsoft Dynamics 365, IBM Maximo, SAP, FIIX, UpKeep. Inspection scope is designed backward from what your maintenance system needs to create a work order, not from what's easy to fly.
Comparison
Commodity Drone Vendors & National Platforms vs. Stratum
Regulatory Credibility
On the Record on the Rules That Govern Industrial Drone Operations
A serious commercial drone operation has a point of view on the rules that shape it. Stratum has filed formal public comments on the two federal proceedings most relevant to industrial drone inspection: the FAA's Beyond Visual Line of Sight rulemaking and the FCC's commercial drone hardware regulation. Both are linked below.
FAA · Docket FAA–2025–1908
What the BVLOS Rule Needs to Get Right for Industrial Drone Operations
Performance-based electronic conspicuity, layered safety, simple right-of-way logic, risk-scaled detect-and-avoid, and realistic transition timelines for small professional operators.
Read the ArticleFCC · Proceeding DA 26-22
Why Commercial Drone Policy Needs a Risk-Based Framework
A tiered commercial-use framework that distinguishes enterprise inspection from national-security-sensitive contexts — built around operator certification, data handling, and operational context.
Read the ArticleThe Problem
Where One-Off Inspection Data Goes to Die
The drone industry has a delivery problem. Vendors fly when called, hand back a PDF, and disappear until the next ad-hoc request. The report lands in a shared drive. The findings never trend. The next inspector starts from scratch.
The result for facility teams: manual re-keying into the CMMS, lost context between cycles, no comparable severity data, and no defensible record when leadership asks why a roof or crane runway needs capital. The inspection happened — but the program didn't.
Stratum exists to fix that. We run the program. We hold the asset register. We deliver structured, severity-rated, CMMS-ready findings every cycle. And we're owner-operated from Northeast Ohio, so the same person responsible for your program shows up to fly it.
