An exercise in utility - Public Service Electric & Gas, Boston Edison and National Fuel Gas Distribution using new applications to provide better field service calls - includes related article on implementing automated field service applications - Company Operations

Software Magazine, June, 1997 by Barbara Francett

Huge public utilities like Public Service Electric & Gas Co., National Fuel Gas Distribution Corp. and Boston Edison share a major problem: how to deliver timely field service to customers needing repairs. Up until recently, field service has been a manual process awash in paperwork. Now, these savvy utilities are taking advantage of custom apps that tie their road warriors directly to centralized corporate databases.In this era of automation, field service remains characterized by manual procedures and mounds of paperwork, much to the dismay of service providers and their customers. Just ask anyone who's had to take a day off from work to wait for a utility company serviceperson because the "arrival time" window spanned some eight hours.

If ever an activity could benefit from information technology, this is it: The payoffs that come from linking remote field service personnel to centralized databases to improve service can be considerable. It's been a long time coming, as the wheels of bureaucracy in organizations such as highly regulated public utilities turn slowly. Nevertheless, imminent deregulation has lit a flame under farsighted utilities, which recognize a business opportunity when they see one.

"We knew deregulation was coming, and we had to position ourselves," says Lou Kaufer, senior IT business partner at Public Service Electric & Gas Co. (PSE&G) in Newark, N.J. "This meant we had to bring significant technology to the business."

According to Kaufer, one of the first new opportunities PSE&G identified to increase revenue was to go beyond their gas service business on hot water heaters and furnaces by offering service contracts on additional appliances, such as clothes dryers and air conditioners, much as big appliance retailers do. In order to take advantage of that opportunity, however, PSE&G needed to improve its approach to service dispatching and work management. "Because labor is our biggest cost, anything that improves labor productivity improves efficiency," Kaufer says.

PSE&G serves a swath of New Jersey that extends from New York City to Philadelphia and comprises 75% of the state's population and all the major industrial areas. Before the new Gas Service Information Management System (GSIMS) was implemented, 800 servicepeople were dispatched from 12 districts to handle service calls -- activating or deactivating gas and electric service, investigating reports of gas leaks and lack of heat, and so on.

"Each serviceperson had their own vehicle and work zone," Kaufer says. "Every day they would get a stack of printed work tickets. Contact with the dispatch station was through radio phone calls. They'd have to fill out work orders and record service times. It was manually intensive -- the routes could be inefficient and the air waves could be busy." The GSIMS, developed with Cambridge, Mass.-based systems developer Sapient Corp., automates the whole process. "This application was driven by PSE&G's business requirement for a realtime connection to dispatch operations and realtime access to the field. PSE&G wanted to shrink the scheduling parameter to two hours," says Chris Davey, Sapient's vice president of sales. "This means extreme connectivity." What differentiates field service applications from sales force automation projects is the critical nature of the information being sent back and forth, Davey adds. "The robustness of the network must be heightened."

The GSIMS system uses public Cellular Digital Packet Data wireless technology from Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile to transmit data from dispatchers to the service vehicles. Now PSE&G servicepeople get their work orders electronically, based on appointment locations and chronology, as well as a customer history.

Sapient added a middleware component from Minneapolis-based Racotek that sends and receives transactions between the central Oracle database and the field units, manages traffic from the server to field clients, and monitors the status of the connection. Sapient also built software that compresses data packets, thus reducing the number of packets sent, as well as synchronization and mapping software for the application's diverse database components.

Aboard each service vehicle is a Pentium 586 pen-based laptop with an extended keyboard running a Watcom remote database. Touching the laptop's light pen to the screen brings up work order details, such as the type and brand of appliances a customer has, to ensure that the serviceperson brings the correct parts; whether the customer owns a dog; and so on. Another touch with the pen to the electronic work order sends a signal to the dispatcher that the serviceperson is "on the way." When that job is done, the service-person brings up an electronic comple- tion screen on the laptop, which automatically creates a time sheet. The next order appears as well. Meanwhile, work management screens allow the dispatchers to view where all the service- people in their districts are, and what orders they are working on. GSIMS, which was rolled out between April and November of last year, has increased productivity by two orders per serviceperson per day, Kaufer says. PSE&G has also been able to consolidate its 12 dispatch districts into four, saving overhead costs.