|
|||||||||||||
Crew management is one of an electric utility’s most critical operations. Not only does it affect how many jobs are completed in what timeframe, it also directly impacts customer satisfaction. Yet, inefficiencies can hinder service delivery and cost the company both time (lost productivity) and money (fewer jobs per day). A single absence can create havoc, forcing dispatchers to scramble to find additional resources with the necessary experience to meet deadlines. A shortage of field resources means electric utilities have to do what it takes to get the job done: hire sub-contractors, pay overtime, or both.
To address these variables, electric companies need to better manage their workforces. Specifically, they need an approach that automates how they schedule each field technician’s day or week, responds to emergency calls in real time, and enables managers to accurately predict near- and long-term workloads and the staffing necessary to handle those workloads. This system should address all of the electric utility’s special requirements and demands across all generation, transmission and distributions activities, including the ongoing creation and maintenance of infrastructure. Adopting such a system will help power companies reduce costs, boost productivity, increase revenues and strengthen relationships with their customers.
The Workforce Schedule Shuffle
- Mandatory reduction of carbon emissions around the world presents huge cost, infrastructure and logistics challenges.
- Commercial customers increasingly demand lower prices, supply security, zero interrupts and higher network capacity while trying to reduce peak usage via demand management and better consumption plans.
- As much as 50 percent of the line worker workforce could retire in the next decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
- Despite an aging infrastructure worldwide and increasing power tools, there is an increasing demand for greater network reliability and 100 percent uptime.
While most electric utilities rely on powerful demand forecasting tools to ensure they continue to achieve the right balance of kilowatt hours (i.e., enough supply to meet future demand), they typically haven’t invested the same resources in managing their workforce based on near- and long-term demand. Many use paper-based systems that provide static, one-time views of the current workforce and their schedules.
These systems limit how quickly they can react to emergencies, much less provide an accurate plan for meeting future demand for line worker minutes. Typically one person (or a team of schedulers) attempt to account for myriad variables when assigning jobs to field technicians, often overlooking such factors as route optimization and matching skill sets to jobs.
Automating the System
Electric utilities need to adopt a service optimization approach that takes into account the inherent complexity in the industry. This approach should automate 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 long-term infrastructure work and respond to emergencies while keeping operational costs low and service at contracted levels. Some of the key features this approach should include are:
- automatic scheduling of the right technician at the right time, based on skills and relative proficiency, service level agreements, drive time, availability and other factors;
- full-scale optimization, including appointment booking, schedule updates and online and off-line optimization;
- the ability to have a unified schedule that includes anything from simple short tasks to multi-day, multi-staged jobs that require multiple resources;
- accurate demand forecasting, which leads to more effective resource planning and efficient scheduling;
- capacity planning that ensures the organization has just enough technicians with the right skills at the right place and time to provide maximum demand coverage at minimal cost;
- crew allocation and management capabilities that aggregate individual technicians into a time-phased crew that is scheduled;
- business intelligence, including operational reports, real-time dashboards and automated alerts, and trend analysis;
- integration with mobile devices for real-time monitoring of actual schedules with “jeopardy” and “delay” alerts;
- scheduling of work to contractors; and
- support for location-based services including street-level routing (SLR), online traffic updates and global positioning system (GPS).
The Real-time Enterprise
These capabilities will enable electric utilities to take a significant step toward becoming real-time enterprises that accurately balance future demand and capacity while responding immediately and efficiently to unplanned events. For example, utilities will be able to better balance planned maintenance with urgent “break/fix” requests and emergencies because they’ll be able to allocate all of their resources based on one single centralized schedule rather than a patchwork of different schedules for different service operations. The scheduling system constantly “listens” for changes and automatically updates the schedule based on shifting priorities to make sure the utility runs its service operation efficiently.
Better demand and capacity planning also helps utilities reduce operational costs such as overtime, travel and subcontractor costs because they know what resources they’ll need for scheduled work, and what we resources they can tap for unscheduled outages, repairs, etc.
One of the most critical pacts electric companies make with their customers is to address urgent service requests quickly. Failure to do so breeds frustration and mistrust. Complete visibility of an automated schedule that accounts for precise technician skills as well as updated schedule, current location and route planning helps electric utilities reduce response times for urgent jobs. A system that automatically considers everything about a job’s urgency and skill requirements as well as the availability and proximity of technicians with the right skills ensures the utility delivers on its promises.
Since the massive blackout in the Northeast and the Energy Policy Act of 2005, compliance with federal mandates about energy reliability has been mandatory. Automated scheduling enables electric utilities to better comply with these regulations because they can ensure resources are available when and where they are needed.
Service optimization is no longer a convenience. It is critical. When electric utilities evolve from running static, map-based systems to automated approaches that eliminate the guesswork and anticipate the myriad variables unique to the industry, they will better align their service operation with business goals. That is, they’ll cut operating costs, increase the number of jobs technicians complete per day, grow revenue and strengthen customer relationships by showing up on time for maintenance or emergency work.
