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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.
FREMONT, CA: While digital transformation can often feel overwhelming, utilities find the transition doable by addressing increasing customer wants, staff expectations, and asset management requirements one step at a time.
Traditionally, the customer contact center was responsible for customer service. Contact center agents were the company's voice, answering client calls, connecting requests to dispatch, activating services, and addressing billing issues. In the future, every employee—from the contact center to the field operations—will be responsible for the utility's reputation in the eyes of its consumers and regulators and must thus be equipped with the data and ability to handle concerns promptly.
This mentality can have a spillover impact on utility operations as a whole. The influence of digitally equipped and empowered field staff is felt in the front and back offices, throughout operations, and, of course, by the consumer. Organizations armed with a streamlined procedure and the means to capitalize on newly available information can handle and manage long-, mid-, and short-cycle tasks more effectively and efficiently.
A utility can expedite the digitization of its field service operations by adopting an operational layer that facilitates connectivity while ensuring operational agility and the inherent variability necessitated by the vast array of field service needs. What is required is an accessible platform that unifies the current landscape (including ERP, EAM, CIS, and OMS/ADMS) and provides a smooth connection across the enterprise. It should also save all acquired data, such as services utilized, prior maintenance concerns, and pertinent asset information (including billing history), so that the entire organization may interact and communicate.
By digitizing field service management for utilities, enterprises will realize several benefits:
Greater efficiency of field service calls: A digital platform gives knowledge about the personnel and assets available in the field and the customer or asset that requires attention. Information such as a technician's particular talents required tools or components, and asset information ensures that the correct specialist, crew, or contractor is swiftly assigned to handle the issue. Agents, dispatchers, and coordinators may now convey pertinent information to field staff, whether handling a probable gas leak, organizing inspections requested by regulators, or coordinating a vast capital project. With dynamic scheduling and access to real-time information on the mobile, field, and grid management, workers can adjust to evolving situations in real-time and coordinate effectively.
For instance, if severe weather is forecasted in a particular region, field teams can utilize analytics to correlate the weather forecast with the likelihood of outages to determine the optimal staging position for employees and equipment. Depending on the sorts of outages and projected repairs in each site, the utility can have field people with the appropriate knowledge and equipment standing by as soon as it is safe. Agents can promptly relay information, such as 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 significant assets of a utility, employees frequently lack the means to access, evaluate, and utilize it.
Field crews would be able to access the repair history of an asset while on the job site if all data were accessible. Using this information, they may discern a pattern of repairs to a unit, suggesting the successful ways used in the past. Similarly, they can obtain additional efforts for that asset or at that job site, enabling them to perform 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 instance, analytics software can analyze asset maintenance data and advocate the replacement of equipment when it makes more sense to do so than to fix it. Similarly, utilizing AI to assign scheduled job durations better can result in continuous improvement that raises the precision of the plan, hence minimizing errors and rework caused by execution diverging from previous inaccurate assumptions regarding how long work activities should take.
In addition, a digital platform can connect employees of a utility to third-party partners, including regulators, contractors, and municipalities, to streamline data-sharing and secure the optimal conclusion. Utility firms can alter their operations gradually by installing a system that integrates legacy apps and tools with data from the entire organization. Digital transformation occurs at a pace that does not overburden the firm or its personnel with a project-based strategy.
