Customer
A Century-old regulated public utility Company that provides energy service to 3.7 million people through 1.5 million electric meters and 900,000 natural gas meters in San Diego and southern Orange counties. The service area spans 4,100 square miles. They have a revenue of $12.18 billion and a total assets value of $66 billion.
Problems to be Solved
The Company wanted to streamline the customer service order processing by contractors and replace paper-based processes to improve transparency between company employees and contractors, so they could easily visualize customer issues. Productivity improvements to address 40% of service orders necessitated revisits, and service staff devoted much of their productive time to the office to pick up and drop off documentation.
The lack of visibility of work planned across five districts resulted in sub-optimal use of contracting staff and poor turnaround time of service orders. The company required a unified planning and scheduling product suite to improve coordination between the service coordinator and dispatcher and the contracting company’s dispatcher.
Additionally, financial reconciliation and vendor payments were made manually, which led to the misclassification of travel time, yard time, labor, and material linked to activity codes, as-built designs, and material/equipment installed being in-accurately recorded, causing inaccurate asset depreciation.
Solution
The Ariya service order application suite is enabled to establish a standardized process for managing Electric Service Orders (ESO) and implement an integrated application that will be intuitive for all users leading to greater transparency between the Company employees and contract employees.
The team implemented a comprehensive strategy to handle customer challenges by designing a mobile-first solution built with people and process-centric goals rather than technology-centric.
The other primary goal is to address cyber security shortcomings in existing digitization initiatives from an out-of-box approach to eliminate the need for contractors to access corporate networks and deploy technology the users are familiar with to speed up onboarding and training of contracting staff.
The Company chose to transition to a digital platform for their service orders and implemented an electronic work order management system. This system enables service crew/inspectors to send service orders and get updates in real-time from the field, removing the need for paper or printing diagrams.
The solution will resolve the below pain points to improve operational efficiency, operator safety, and regulatory compliance.
- Eliminated Printing entire job packets
- Missing paperwork
- Extensive manual steps/coordination with H&M to create route sheets
- Messy route sheets
- Crews driving back to the office for schedule changes
- EGISS (Invoicing Team) rejecting orders for missing info
- Scanning completed work order packages into SAP
- Manually completing bundles/pre-requisite/order
- Manual data entry and reconciling every order
- Limited visibility to job information and schedule
- Redundant data entry
Business Outcomes
- The project was implemented on schedule in 15 months with 25% additional scope; the cost savings were $1 million/annum with the highest ROI and lowest TCO to date for the Customer.
- The Customer managed to achieve ROI in 1 year, with their total cost of ownership being one-tenth the amount of what similar applications have cost up until now.
- This cloud-based mobile solution was designed prior to the onset of COVID-19, yet it has been implemented in response to the pandemic. By utilizing this solution, field staff are able to fulfill service orders without having to visit Customer’s local offices, as all necessary information including engineering drawings is available on tablets.
- The onboarding of field staff has been drastically cut from weeks to only 3 hours, thanks to the implementation of time and mileage capture with messaging. This process allows an invoice submitted by a contracting company to be reviewed and approved within an hour instead of two. Thus, self-service is truly enabled.