Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April 2009 - Index

All in the Family: Managing Outsourced Service Contractors
highly sophisticated planning and scheduling. However, contractors
also see some downside by exposing their internal information
and possibly the headaches of having to work with the information
systems of several different organizations for with which they
contract.
Alternatively, contractors may elect to use their own work management
solution and arrange for frequent exchanges of information. This
way, they can store all of their information in their own system, while
choosing which information to share with others. This may not be as
difficult as one may think, as it is possible to start with simple and
basic integration.
Since many small contractors don’t invest in their own information
technology infrastructure, they may wish to investigate work and
project management solutions that are available under the Software
as a Service (SaaS) model. Such solutions are often industry-specific
and provide a wealth of capabilities. Some of these services allow
simple integration, which may be used to share information with the
contracting organizations.
Both of these models – “Portal” and “Integrated Work Management”
– enable timely communication of critical information that enables
both the utility and its contractor to work in a more predictable,
efficient, and effective complement to each other. The result of
flushing out and facing these challenges holds huge potential for
utilities as contractor usage increases. For example:
• Long-range planning becomes possible as visibility to the future
workload, and all resource availability increases for the utility and
the contractor.
• Current job status from the contractor enables more effective
usage of internal employees that must be coordinated, including
proactive intervention, when needed.
• Short-term planning becomes easier for the utility with visibility
into contractor availability. In turn, contractors with greater
visibility into potential demand can be more flexible to meet
short-term needs.
• Work between contractors and utilities’ internal workforce
becomes safer and more efficient based upon the sharing of
safety procedures, job information, and schedules.
• Greater communication and information sharing enables a more
aligned and informed face to the customer, regardless of the
resource’s direct employer.
Over time, we’ll see a tendency by organizations to prefer selecting
contractors who facilitate information sharing and planning
collaboration. This may trigger the next phase, where the sharing and
4 I March-April 2009 Issue
collaboration will occur within an electronic “marketplace” where
many utilities and utility contractors interact on contracts, bids and
agreements. Until that day, their critical need for information will be
served by a utility-centric solution (where each contractor is given
limited access via the portal), or by integration of the utility’s and
contractor’s work management solutions.
The shared information will be used for long-range planning, setting
times and plans for lengthy projects; short-range planning, updating
plans and fleshing them out with more detail; execution monitoring
and collaboration guiding the cooperation of all involved parties;
and business analytics to assess the quality of each contractor,
refine the estimates of job durations and costs, and enable feedback
into long-range planning for improving operational aspects such as
the mix of in-house employees and contractors.
For customer-facing tasks, these mechanisms will work side-byside
with periodic assessments of customer satisfaction, generating
valuable feedback on the consistency and quality of work provided
by internal and external employees.
Do you still remember where we left Harry? Being the capable and
experienced professional that he is, he is surely able to bring the
story to a happy ending, but it may take him substantial effort,
inhibit his ability to react to changes in a timely manner, and cause
undue stress on work and life to get the job done.
He would certainly prefer to see the software automatically notice
the non-availability of the linemen who should have worked with the
contractor and find the most efficient solution – delay the dig by
two weeks, assigning it to another contractor (the software knows
that contractor has the required availability, skills and equipment);
and assign another job to the first contractor – a job that wasn’t as
urgent, but that still needs doing.
After a weekend that was stormy in more ways than one, Harry
deserves such ease and convenience, and so does his employer, his
contractors and – most of all – his customers.
About the Author
Dr. Moshe BenBassat is Chairman and CEO of ClickSoftware.
Following a long and successful academic career with positions
at USC, Tel Aviv University and UCLA, Dr. BenBassat established
himself as one of the world’s leaders in the area of optimization
and decision support software for a wide variety of applications.
His research work was supported by DARPA, NIH, Ballistic Missile
Defense Agency (via TRW), ARI (U.S. Army Research Institute),
NASA and NSF. Dr. BenBassat has been published in leading
professional journals, led many executive training workshops and
has lectured in numerous industry events worldwide.