Technology enables agile storm response by utilities

Advanced mobile workforce management systems—integrated with asset management and outage management systems–let utilities forecast, model and plan for heightened demand, specifically around storm operations. This also helps utilities achieve greater productivity, even in times of heavy demand.

The benefits go beyond reduced lag time. Such upgrades provide a direct means for the host utility to send workflows and instructions, as well as receive information—such as status updates on completed jobs, expected time until restoration, working and fatigue hours—all in near real-time. Most importantly, we’re talking about bringing order to chaos, to allow for more optimal deployment of every worker, and to enable more responsive and accurate updates to citizens, government agencies, and the media.

Agility achieved with automated prioritization

Improved communications itself is a great benefit in improving storm response, but the biggest benefit comes from using technology to prioritize and automate work-order assignments. Automated task prioritization is critical for the utility industry (given the number of aging assets, organizations need to work ahead of breakdowns), and it is a game-changer when it comes to storm response.

Automated work-management prioritization ensures that the ongoing process of reshuffling employees and jobs gets addressed and completed using intelligent algorithms based on predefined service policies. These systems can be programmed to quickly match available backup resources with utilities’ specific needs, in accordance with priority and regulation compliance. It allows executives to react to changing conditions in the field based upon real-time, mobile feedback.

The weather forecast calls for events that will cause more potential outages, and this poses significant challenges to even the best-prepared utilities. But the good news is J.D. Power’s 2014 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study indicated that utilities can win the battle. Overall customer satisfaction with residential electric utilities has increased year over year, driven primarily by improvements in corporate citizenship and outage communications, according to researchers. Mobile device deployments, workforce management and analytics tie directly back to improving outage communications, and they can be a key to maximizing a utility’s resources when bad weather disrupts the status quo.

Mike Karlskind has over 15 years of experience streamlining processes and optimizing decisions for service organizations in a wide variety of industries including computer services, utilities, telecommunications, capital equipment, home services, retail services, insurance, and medical equipment. This includes recommending and implementing streamlined processes, service policies, user roles, programs for change implementation, training courses, and defining user roles for greater productivity. He is a contributor to ClickSoftware’s patent for the “Method and system for assigning human resources to provide services” (US 6,985,872 B2).