Leadent featured in Utilities Week - 14.07.2006
This article originally appeared in Utility Week on 14th July 2006
"Capture asset data and gain an edge"
Introducing mobile communications and automated scheduling for utilities' field force engineers is a quick way to improve workforce productivity and asset management - and to meet rising customer expectations.
The technology works "out of the box", and the hardware necessary to keep mobile engineers in constant communication with base is tried and tested. Today, repair and maintenance operations can share consistent, meaningful data in the field and send back up-to-date results.
Maintenance routines can be planned and distributed using wireless technology to rugged handheld devices, along with geographic information system (GIS) information and technical data. Everything the technician needs to locate and work on an asset is now available in real time, in the field.
Forecasting work schedules that include a combination of routine maintenance, capital projects and reactive maintenance has become increasingly accurate thanks to scheduling soft- ware that uses complex algorithms to match workload with available, skilled resources that are in the right place.
Enabling the mobile fieldforce cuts operating costs, and boosts productivity by up to 20 per cent for some companies. However, these immediate benefits should not be seen as the only goal of such projects. Nor should the ease with which such systems can be deployed disguise their impact on the workforce and the effort that must go into changing the organisation's culture.
Effectively enabling the fieldforce creates a wealth of valuable data about the condition of a utility's assets. When this data is combined with a GIS, a utility can build up a true picture of the health of underground as well as overground infrastructure.
The goal of any utility business should be customer satisfaction, and customers value reliability of service above all else. It may be more exciting for field engineers to rush around fixing things when they fail, but reactive maintenance is more expensive and compromises reliability more than a planned, condition-based approach.
The traditional practice of making a local foreman responsible for allocating daily work orders to a team of engineers is now widely considered inefficient and expensive. And simply replicating this using automated scheduling software and mobile communications will not address the problem.
Scheduling software needs input from the human resources system so jobs can be allocated to the engineers with the right skill sets and aptitudes. Utilities currently work with, on average, one dispatcher for every ten field workers - breakdown recovery organisations are now operating with one dispatcher for up to 100 mobile technicians. Properly set up scheduling software can take away most of the manual decision making, leaving managers to intervene only in exceptional circumstances.
Local maintenance practices are often inefficient and can lead to variable standards of service across a company's operations. It is a myth that local knowledge is king - by collecting asset condition data centrally across a company, maintenance procedures can be standardised, weeding out local inefficiencies.
The way jobs are allocated to field engineers needs careful thought. Offering them some flexibility over which jobs they tackle in which order may be marginally less efficient than allocating work job-by-job, but can greatly improve job satisfaction. Maintenance scheduling soft- ware effectively eliminates overtime - but if field engineers rely on overtime, a different incentive regime will have to be put in place to replace the lost income.
After 15 years of incentive-based regulation, utilities need to fundamentally transform their businesses to make meaningful improvements in operating efficiency - it is no good chipping away at the edges any more.
Asset-intensive organisations like utilities are transforming the way they work and are embracing technology to drive greater efficiency. Mobile technology has become accessible to everyone and is a major factor in increasing the quality of management information and asset- related data. Organisations that can capture and use consistent information across the enterprise from field to back-office will gain the edge.
Mark Stevens is director of utilities practice for Leadent