This Insider article covers workforce scheduling in the auto industry

1. SourceGas Automates Work Orders with In-House Effort
in Workforce Scheduling
Utility Takes the
Driver’s Seat
This article appeared in the JUL AUG SEP 2013 issue
of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com)
and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.
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2. Objective: Automate work
order and dispatch operations
Solution: SAP Workforce
Scheduling and Optimization
by ClickSoftware, customized
in house
Benefits: Unified work order
processes across a four-state
coverage area, increased
routing efficiency, and
reduced exposure to risk
At a Glance
The number of work orders processed per miles traveled is a
key performance indicator (KPI) for utility companies. This
KPI is especially significant for SourceGas, a natural gas dis-
tribution utility that covers Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming,
and Arkansas, with territories that include many large, rural
areas. And maximizing driver efficiency across the business
takes on even more importance in these rural territories
where re-routing technicians means tacking on hefty fuel,
maintenance, and other operational costs.
With manual processes driving its work order and dispatch
systems, SourceGas knew this particular metric of work or-
ders per miles wasn’t as effective as it could be. So, the com-
pany decided to upgrade the aging mobile system it used to
dispatch its approximately 500,000 work orders per year to
roughly 500 field technicians on mobile devices. When the
utility began searching for a new mobile solution that could
keep up with regulatory and business process changes, auto-
mating its work order and workforce scheduling processes
were key considerations.
SourceGas’s predecessor had installed the original mo-
bile system in 2000 when mobile applications were still in
relative infancy. And since the utility hadn’t made any major
updates to the system along the way, the solution was out-
dated. With the platform servers also difficult to replace in
disaster-recovery scenarios, and enhancements to the sys-
tem cost-prohibitive, SourceGas wanted an alternative that
would allow for long-overdue improvements.
“There was a lot of risk associated with the old system, and
we couldn’t continue to support necessary enhancements,”
says Bryan Ax, Enterprise Solutions (IT) Project Manager
at SourceGas. “When we did need to make changes, some-
thing as simple as tweaking a field length to support more
characters could cost a great deal of money.”
Owning the Pipeline
In exploring possible mobile upgrades, another important
consideration for SourceGas was to tackle the lion’s share of
the implementation, relying on vendor support for develop-
ment or configuration only when it ran into roadblocks. The
organization’s intent was threefold: First, reduce the imple-
mentation cost. Second, eliminate the cumbersome mainte-
nance process it experienced with its legacy system, which
was custom-coded by third-party vendors. Third, ensure the
new system met unique requirements, such as time report-
ing, while adhering to strict regulatory agency rules.
With these goals in mind, SourceGas chose SAP Workforce
Scheduling and Optimization by ClickSoftware to integrate
with its existing SAP landscape, which included SAP ERP and
SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM). (Learn
more about SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization in
the sidebar at the end of the article.)
“Because we serve both regulated and non-regulated mar-
kets and cover four states where our business rules vary, we
by Ken Murphy, Senior Writer
have a need for rapid and constant change, so it
was important to have a tool that we could custom-
ize ourselves,” explains Thom Bookwalter, Senior
Director of Enterprise Solutions at SourceGas.
“A lot of the work we performed is work that
ClickSoftware experts normally handle as part of
the implementation, but we wanted to take it on
ourselves. The ability to make our own changes to
the software empowers us to serve our customers
as efficiently and promptly as possible.”
Tapping New Reserves
That learning phase started in the summer of 2011
when SourceGas kicked off a collaborative require-
ments workshop with the implementation partner
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3. ClickSoftware, the dispatch office, division managers, ser-
vice technicians, and the enterprise solutions team. The
goal was to prioritize system requirements and develop
rules and configurations to support work order and sched-
uling processes. SourceGas settled on three priorities:
1. Automate work order scheduling
2. Ensure minimal change management for field
technicians
3. Maintain its existing timesheet process
Automating work order scheduling was an obvious place
for SourceGas to start because the business believed an
automated approach had significant advantages over the
previous manual approach. Manually dispatching all work
was a time-consuming process for dispatchers, and without
systematized scheduling policies, it was difficult for all ser-
vice technicians to consistently receive workloads aligned
with business objectives.
SourceGas
Headquarters: Golden, Colorado
Industry: Utility
Employees: Approximately 1,000
Company details:
• Services 410,000 customers and operates nearly
18,000 miles of distribution, gathering, and
transmission pipeline
• Coverage area of Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
and Wyoming totals 332,437 square miles, or
about half the size of Alaska
• Started operations in 1936 as the Kansas Pipeline
and Gas Co., with a focus on serving small towns
and communities
• Owned by GE Energy Financial Services and
Alinda Investments, LLC (spun off from Kinder
Morgan in 2007)
SAP solutions:
• SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization by
ClickSoftware
• SAP for Utilities industry solution
• SAP CRM/IC WebClient (used in call center)
• SAP Biller Direct/UCES (customer portal)
• SAP NetWeaver PI
• SAP BusinessObjects solutions
SourceGas wanted a new mobile solution that could keep up with regulatory and business
process changes, automate work order and workforce scheduling processes, and dispatch
approximately 500,000 work orders per year to roughly 500 field technicians on mobile devices.
Company Snapshot
“The dispatchers are experienced and have the necessary knowl-
edge regarding what skillsets technicians required for certain work
orders; however, the process depended on dispatchers committing
to memory the more than 225 different types of work our techni-
cians perform in the field,” Ax explains. “We spent a lot of time
and effort developing a single truth of this information and creating
transparency around the scheduling policies.”
Before SourceGas implemented SAP Workforce Scheduling and
Optimization, the work order process started, as it does now, with
a call from a customer to the SourceGas call center in Fayetteville,
Arkansas. SAP CRM blocked capacity and simultaneously created a
work order that was sent to the dispatch center, where dispatchers
assigned the work out to technicians who picked it up with their
Panasonic Toughbook mobile devices. While the previous software
integrated with SAP CRM to track a work order from start to finish,
dispatch was still the go-between to manually set a work order off
on its journey into the field.
Now, an SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver
PI) adapter automatically handles the messaging between the SAP
system and SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization, and work
orders are scheduled and dispatched using the rules and objec-
tives configured in the system, barring the exceptions flagged for
dispatch intervention.
Filtering Impurities
From the requirements workshop through development, valida-
tions, and training, the implementation process took a little over
a year, with SourceGas completing its phased rollout when it went
live with its last division in December 2012. From the outset, the
company’s decision to own the implementation proved prescient,
as challenges mounted in configuring the software to account for all
the quirks of its unique service area as well as in establishing rules
for types of work. For example, what constitutes an emergency work
order? Are work order priorities the same in an urban area, such as
Fayetteville, Arkansas, as they are in rural Wyoming? Will service-
level agreement rules differ for a technician’s service window?
“The biggest challenge was designing the system to route all
the work and schedule all those various rules, and then reviewing
that schedule to make sure it does what you told it to do,” says Ax.
“That’s a very time-consuming and ongoing process.”
Because one of the top priorities for the project was minimal
change management for technicians, customization wasn’t limited
to setting rules and priorities for scheduling. To achieve this out-
come, SourceGas wanted the new mobile app user experience to
mirror the existing user experience as closely as possible. This was
especially important for time reporting, which needed to be simpli-
fied but still adhere to certain business rules for proper accounting.
While staying true to the existing user experience, SourceGas was
also able to enhance the software. To improve technician efficien-
cies, one enhancement was tailoring service order completion data
sent back to SAP ERP for each type of service order rather than
displaying all fields on all orders. Another important enhancement
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4. was driven by safety measures. “As a natural gas utility company,
safety is one of our primary concerns,” says Diane Dodd, Senior
Manager of Application Development at SourceGas. “To make
sure our emergency orders get the proper attention, we added
audio alerts to SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization for
dispatchers and on the technicians’ mobile devices. Another new
safety feature enables technicians to set a timer to alert dispatch
if they haven’t returned to their vehicle by a certain time.”
User training was a key step in the transition. After providing
input during the exploratory and design phases, technicians got
their hands on the application for initial training in June 2012.
“The goal of that process was to ensure everything met their
expectations,” Ax says. “We trained about 20% of the workforce
not only to get their feedback, but also to make sure that when
we went live, we’d have the appropriate training materials ready
based on what we heard.”
SourceGas also counted on its operations team end users to
perform the approximately 225 service order types using the
new application to help ensure that every business scenario was
accounted for. For example, when a technician closes out a work
order for a meter exchange, information such as data from a final
reading moves into SAP ERP, and certain automation has to hap-
pen before the new meter is recognized and synced to a customer
account. All this automation had to be tested — for this and every
other type of work that technicians perform.
So while SourceGas spent much of the first half of 2012 in
development, this final three-month period before the initial
go-live in September was a key step in making final refinements.
“We used a very iterative approach and an agile development
methodology,” says Ax. “We had regular calls with our operations
team and a committee of super-user technicians to make sure we
were building the system to specification. This strategy helped
ensure buy-in and that we weren’t missing business processes.
And because we were developing much of the functionality
with internal resources, we helped ensure that we’d have an
application that meets all our needs.”
A Single-Source Flow
While the system was custom-built to meet the needs of Source-
Gas, it is still relatively early to determine a full accounting of
tangible benefits. SourceGas has completed more than 230,000
work orders and paid 600,000 timesheet records since go-live.
Even so, more data needs to be collected before reports like man-
power studies shed additional light on operational efficiencies
and benefits.
“We’re still in a system stabilization mode,” says Ax. “But one
key benefit from a cost avoidance perspective is that we have
been able to do most of the corrections ourselves without having
to go back to a vendor for those updates. Operationally, we’ve
received positive feedback about the timesheet functionality,
automated scheduling, and a range of improvements in usabil-
ity to the previous system, but there are still behind-the-scenes
analytics to perform to quantify some of those pieces.”
Moving forward, SourceGas plans to use SAP Workforce Sched-
uling and Optimization to focus more directly on the customer
experience. For example, some of the application enhancement
possibilities include allowing customers to place orders online, send-
ing text messages to let customers know when technicians are en
route, and collecting digital signatures and processing payments from
customers directly in the field.
Along with customer expectations, the utility industry needs have
also experienced a dramatic shift — from work type and prioritization
to follow-up orders. “Our industry has seen a rapidly changing environ-
ment around compliance items and requested data. SAP Workforce
Scheduling and Optimization empowers us to rapidly make changes
in house, which is very important from the perspective of adapting
to this environment,” says Doug Whitefoot, Senior Vice President of
Operations at SourceGas.
“There’s a lot of potential now that we have the flexibility of this
modern platform,” says Bookwalter. “We’re continuing to move for-
ward, and the customer aspect is part of that. Overall, one of our main
focuses as a company is to look at every opportunity to automate func-
tions in the field and throughout the organization. We have a vision
of inputting information just once via SAP Workforce Scheduling and
Optimization, and it just flows through.”
SourceGas Meets Regulatory Compliance with
SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization
SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization is the solution
of choice for SourceGas as it offers the customizability to
take into account all of the company’s unique requirements.
Despite complex regulatory needs and changing business
processes, dynamic configuration capabilities led to
significant improvements through the automated solution.
With SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization,
SourceGas is also able to take the implementation into
its own hands, another key consideration when choosing
the solution. “SourceGas wanted to be hands-on with the
solution, limiting configuration and development support to
exceptions or problems,” says Imry Linden, Vice President
of Professional Services at ClickSoftware. “The training and
onboarding we provide allowed SourceGas IT and business
teams to become experts in the software, allowing them to
implement, maintain, and grow the system as they moved
forward.”
With SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization, any
type of mobile workforce management requirement can
be addressed with as much local support as required.
Enterprise-wide solutions for customer demand forecasting,
capacity planning, shift/roster planning, scheduling,
mobility, and business analytics are all part of the offering
and can solve the most complex service needs.
To learn more about how mobile workforce management
can help your enterprise, visit http://bit.ly/ZroBhV.
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