Distributech 2015 - Mobile Work management

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UNS Energy is comprised of 3 regulated utilities (Tucson Electric Power, UNS Gas and UNS Electric) with approximately 657,000 customers throughout Arizona. My primary responsibility is as the GIS Supervisor for UNS Gas but I do oversee aspects of GIS operations for UNS Electric as well. As you can see, we have a very large (and if you are familiar with Arizona) a very rural service territory. UNS Gas and UNS Electric are primarily Esri and Schneider Electric clients. Tucson Electric Power is primarily a Smallworld client with a growing Esri footprint.

As a product manager, one of my primary roles is to understand technology requirements of our utility and telecom customers, and then propose products that strike the balance between the low-cost configurable app that works OK but doesn’t fully meet your needs, and the custom solution your users expect that can be incredibly expensive to build and maintain.
With mobile technology, this balance is no easy nut to crack, because the primary business driver is a need for improved collaboration, between many parties working in the field and in the office, that have disparate skill sets. Meanwhile, utilities have less resources and more responsibilities. So you need efficient and effective ways to send instruction to the field, bring information back in to the office, and tie all of this together to achieve business goals.

Through our research with a lot of customers, I can sum up the essential requirements for utility mobile solutions with 3 S words: Simple, Spatial, Secure.

SIMPLE
To deploy and configure so you can use a single consolidated solution that deploys rapidly for multiple scenarios such as inspection, damage assessment, outage response, leak survey, underground locates, and construction as-builting
To use in the field with or without connectivity, so crews can view work, share status, and record results in the form of tabular data, photos, and redline sketches
To build workflows and integrations that tie mobile processes into the business and enterprise systems
To maintain and upgrade through frequent release of enhancements with automated deployment, so users can always have the latest technology

SPATIAL
Leverages your existing GIS investment including data and software
Allows spatial-based dispatch of crews so you can create work associated with features and locations in your GIS
Shares relevant GIS information with field crews so their work can be informed by it, and enables them to provide feedback for improvements to the GIS data

SECURE
The solution must have consistency in security policy, using the IT processes already in place
Asset and other sensitive enterprise data must live on-premise behind the firewall, where corporate IT manages access to it
All access is to mobile solution is authenticated and communications are encrypted

What would a solution to these requirements look like? Here’s what it could look like to a field crew…
First of all, a map view, giving geospatial context to the work that needs to happen. So it would include backdrop layers, asset data, and the location of work
Also, tools such as search, so that crews can find assets and customers relative to their current location, and identify to query the map for detailed information about a location
And it would provide a list of current work for the user, perhaps multiple types of work listed together, and integrated with the map view, so crews know exactly where they need to go and what they need to do, and they can see detailed instructions about their work and capture status and results

Back in the office…

As we have heard a lot this week, sensors will continue to play a larger role in utility operations.
The basic example is camera, which for example with mobile outage response can provide photos of the situation
Mobile design and as-builting can benefit from onboard GPS
And how about more sophisticated, like the Schneider Electric ProRelay Box, which is used for on-site testing of transformer relays… it could provide measurements as results of an inspection managed on the mobile app

Here is the architecture of our dreams which will enable this mobile solution.
Mobile Apps are native and optimized for your devices and their accessories, lightweight, and carry only the functionality your crews need to do their jobs. They connect to the enterprise for asset and customer information, and to mobile services for details of field work.
The Utility enterprise has existing systems that will participate in the mobile solution, including Active Directory for security policy, enterprise systems such as GIS, CIS, ADMS, and work management systems, and office apps such Microsoft Excel for reporting and analysis.
Both the mobile apps and enterprise systems connect to Mobile Services. This is the lynchpin where mobile tasks and workflow are managed. As a vendor, we want manage and scale the mobile services in a data center, thus reducing deployment and admin costs for ourselves and our customers. And even though these services are outside the utility enterprise, access is based on existing active directory security policy, and sensitive asset and customer data still lives within the enterprise firewall.

Regarding the CapEx/OpEx issue, Darin is right. With the subscription-based hybrid-cloud solution of our dreams, our customers are at least partially paying through operating expenses.
The way to navigate this hurdle is to show your organization the operating expense savings that will be realized with a simple, spatial, and secure mobile solution that has a cloud-hosted back end.
For example…

But this all academic without some real metrics.
One of our customers, Lincoln Electric System, shared with us some benefits they realized with their mobile solution:
Initial implementation of the solution in 2 days (previous custom solution required 6 months)
First field user trained in 90 minutes (previous app required 1-2 days of training)
Data processing and reporting in less than 1 hour per week without GIS analyst (previously 2-4 hours per week by GIS analyst)
Multiple enhancement requests to product delivered in as little as 3 weeks
Product quality improvement reduced LES data plan usage approximately 40% before customer could report a problem with high data plan usage

The mobile solution of our dreams is a consolidated solution that is simple, spatial, and secure that meets utility business needs without expensive implementation, customization, maintenance, and in the end increases consumer satisfaction and lowers the cost of doing business