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Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April - Index

All of these challenges can amount to a big nightmare for utilities
still using paper-based or legacy software programs to manage their
workforces. Acting on stale data and hunches about where technicians
are, the status of jobs, unplanned emergencies and other factors leads
to a host of problems, including fewer jobs per day, longer response
times and frustrated customers.
Worse still, conducting the trend analyses and demand forecasting to
plan for future workforce needs becomes a series of “best guesses”
that may prove costly. Trying to project substation installation staffing
while ensuring you have enough technicians for other projects without
comprehensive data would be like trying to predict the weather using
only binoculars.
Automation at work
Electric utilities need to adopt a service optimization approach
that simplifies the industry’s inherent complexity. This approach
automates and optimizes workforce scheduling and planning for a
variety of industry-specific work types – including meter operations,
maintenance, construction work, meter reading and emergencies
– from a single, centralized application.
This type of service optimization enables electric utilities to
better complete routine tasks and maintenance, perform longterm
infrastructure work and respond to emergencies while
keeping operational costs low and service at contracted levels.
More importantly, critical information about where technicians are
throughout the day, their job completion rate, etc. becomes available
in real time. Managers, dispatchers and field crews can react more
quickly to everything from unexpected delays to emergencies to
reduce customer service wait times.
Automating scheduling certainly has its benefits: reduced costs;
streamlined job management; better real-time visibility of operations;
more productive field technicians who spend more time on site than
on the road; more on-time arrivals; and faster job completion. Decision
support and optimization software relies on agents that constantly
“listen” to the stream of incoming information from the entire system;
including new emergency jobs, jobs that take longer or shorter than
planned, or a technician who is stuck in traffic. The software processes
that information against a broad set of variables and business rules
such as technician skill set, geographic region, tools on the truck,
service level agreements etc. and determines how to keep the schedule
continually optimized throughout the day and across the entire
enterprise.
Electric utilities using paper-based or simplistic scheduling systems
would benefit from a unified schedule that includes anything from
simple short tasks to more complex projects that may span over many
days require multiple resources and have several stages. Rather than
having to work off of different printouts or separate applications,
managers have one view of all resources in the field based on job
type at any point during the day. Additionally, managers would
have crew allocation and management capabilities that aggregate
individual technicians into a time-phased crew that is scheduled, so
they have more accurate information about which technician is where
throughout the day.
Unified scheduling also encompasses managing third-party
contractors. Historically, this has been a challenge in any utility
industry as contractors typically work to their own schedules more
than what the utility tells them. Just as disturbingly, contractors
don’t have the access to the complete data, maps, repair history,
etc. that the internal workforce uses. Automatically scheduling the
contractors and gathering real-time information about their progress
is a significant step forward for electric utilities that want to stay
profitable and ensure a consistent level of service.
March-April 2008 Issue I
65
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