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Utilities Business Review | Thursday, April 07, 2022
With artificial intelligence (AI) and visibility into real-time analytics, field staff may more efficiently manage equipment and assets to enhance decision-making and identify future problems.
FREMONT, CA: While digital transformation can usually feel astonishing, utilities find the transition likely by managing increasing customer wants, staff expectations, and asset management needs one step at a time.
Commonly, the customer contact centre was accountable for customer service. Contact centre agents were the company's voice, answering client calls, connecting requests to dispatch, triggering services, and addressing billing issues. Eventually, every employee—from the contact centre to the field operations—will be accountable for the utility's reputation in the eyes of its consumers and regulators and must be equipped with the data and capacity to handle concerns promptly.
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This mentality can have a spillover impact on utility operations as a whole. The impact of digitally equipped and empowered field staff is felt in the front and back offices, around operations, and, certainly, by the consumer. Organizations armed with a streamlined procedure and the standards to capitalize on newly available information can control and manage long-, mid-, and short-cycle tasks more effectively and efficiently.
A utility can accelerate the digitization of its field service operations by adopting an operational layer that facilitates connectivity while securing operational agility and the inherent variability necessitated by the vast array of field service requirements. What is needed is an accessible platform that unifies the current landscape (including ERP, EAM, CIS, and OMS/ADMS) and supplies a smooth connection across the enterprise. It should also save all cultivated data, like services utilized, prior maintenance concerns, and pertinent asset information (comprising billing history), so that the whole organization may interact and communicate.
By digitizing field service management for utilities, enterprises will understand several benefits:
Greater efficiency of field service calls: A digital platform provides knowledge regarding the personnel and assets available in the field and the customer or asset that requires attention. Information like a technician's particular talents, necessary tools or components, and asset information ensures that the correct specialist, crew, or contractor is expeditiously assigned to handle the issue. Agents, dispatchers, and coordinators may now convey pertinent information to field staff, whether managing a probable gas leak, organizing inspections requested by regulators, or coordinating a huge capital project. With dynamic scheduling and access to real-time information on mobile, field, and grid management, workers can adjust to developing situations in real time and coordinate effectively.
For example, suppose extreme weather is forecasted in a particular region. Field teams can use analytics to correlate the weather forecast with the likelihood of outages to choose the optimal staging position for employees and equipment. Then, based on the outages and projected repairs in each site, the utility can have field people with the proper knowledge and equipment standing by as soon as it is safe. Moreover, agents can quickly relay information, like downed power lines and service restoration updates, from the field to consumers while also relaying information from customers to technicians to aid in the restoration process.
Better insights through data sharing: Frequently, a lack of data sabotages field service operations. Many utilities cannot promptly manage and evaluate customer and asset data, rendering the information meaningless. While data is one of the most important assets of a utility, employees frequently lack the standards to access, evaluate, and utilize it.
Field crews would be able to ingress the repair history of an asset while on the job site if all data were accessible. Through this information, they may discern a pattern of repairs to a unit, suggesting the successful ways used in the past. Likewise, they can obtain extra efforts for that asset or at that job site, allowing them to accomplish all necessary tasks and enhance operational efficiency.
With artificial intelligence (AI) and visibility into real-time analytics, field staff may more effectively manage equipment and assets to improve decision-making and identify future problems. For example, analytics software can analyze asset maintenance data and advocate the substitute of equipment when it makes more sense to do so than to fix it. Also, employing AI to assign scheduled job durations better can outcome in continuous improvement that increases the precision of the plan, hence reducing errors and rework due to execution diverging from last inaccurate assumptions about how long work activities should take.
Moreover, a digital platform can connect employees of a utility to third-party partners, comprising regulators, contractors, and municipalities, to streamline data-sharing and secure the optimal conclusion. Utility firms can change their operations gradually by installing a system that integrates legacy apps and tools with data from the entire organization. Consequently, digital transformation happens at a pace that does not overload the firm or its personnel with a project-based strategy.
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