Austin Energy is a community-owned electric utility and a department of the City of Austin, Texas, serving 366,161 customer accounts out of a population base of about 700,000. The field technicians are a big part of servicing these customers by, among other things, conducting meter readings and meter re-reads for billing, activating or deactivating service, and performing various types of maintenance.

While Austin Energy is equipped to handle the workload, the utility and its field technicians were swimming in paperwork ¡ª and a lot of it. Everyone agreed a new system to manage work orders for field personnel was needed. The solution incorporated rugged notebooks and wireless capable software, and resulted in a streamlined workflow with more time spent working on service orders in the field and dramatically less time on paperwork and other back-office functions.

Prior to implementing the new system, when a customer would contact Austin Energy's call center with a request, it became a work order that was compiled and added to a stack printed out that evening. The following morning, supervisors and managers would sort through the orders and file them into bins for the arriving field personnel. After spending an hour or so sorting their own piles (based on order of importance, job type and geographical location), field staff would head out to work. For the staff of 25-19 on the day shift and 6 at night ¡ª that translated into anywhere from 65 to 70 orders per day, which is a hefty stack of paperwork. At the end of the day, field workers would return to the office and file their work orders, and then the process would start all over again. The total time to fulfillment averaged seven days.

This paper-based system was susceptible to ¡°acts of nature¡± ¡ª human or technological. Just getting to the field was a challenge when the printers ran out of paper. Or, in the field, if a gust of wind blew a field technician's work orders around in his truck, he would have to spend time rearranging them in a logical order. While the system worked pretty well, there was room for improvement.

In 2002, Austin Energy kicked off a plan to radically modernize its processes and workforce. Three critical components were identified:

• The need for more efficient business processes

• Software that would decrease the reliance on paperwork and allow work orders to be distributed and filed wirelessly in order to cut down on errors

• Hardware rugged enough to survive day-to-day life mounted to the dashboard of a pickup truck and in the hands of a busy technician.

The software solution was divided into two parts. The first part is named ¡°Mobility¡± from the software provider SPL (San Francisco). Mobility allows dispatchers at the Revenue Management and Control office to issue work orders and send them wirelessly to technicians. Technicians, equipped with notebook computers capable of wireless Internet access, receive their work orders for the day, and view and sort them as they see fit. Once an order is fulfilled, it is sent wirelessly back to the head office for billing and administration.

Technicians also can send messages to other trucks. If they spot an emergency or a hazard, they can instantly contact the dispatcher to alert authorities. The software also enables personnel to call up the history of a particular site to identify possible trends or problems that might indicate, for example, if and when a leak occurred.

Mobility also has an added feature that allows supervisors to monitor their crew's workload. If one technician finishes all of his or her work orders early, the supervisor can fill their plate again by moving jobs from other technicians.

The second part of the solution came from a partner of SPL's named Click. Click offers a service that handles the scheduling and routing of work orders for every technician. Click takes into account where the technicians start their day and their usual neighborhoods, and can be tweaked for each technician according to rules, objectives and skill levels.

Having selected its software solution, Austin Energy had to determine the computer hardware that best fit the needs of its employees.

Texas routinely sees days that exceed 100¡ÞF temperatures. In the confines of a pickup truck roasting in the midday sun, many notebooks and tablets simply can't take the heat. Then there's the rainy season. Computers have to be able to survive exposure to moisture, such as the wet hands and uniform of a representative who has been out in the pouring rain.

And, of course, there are the rigors of life with a field worker: Notebooks will be dropped or stepped on, they'll have food and drink spilled on them, and they'll be subject to the constant vibration of a vehicle. The solution had to be capable of supporting wireless communication so work orders could be sent and received, and technicians could review key information about a customer's history. The solution had to be reliable because the impact of failure would be significant, affecting hundreds of customers.

Austin Energy began by evaluating devices from several manufacturers of rugged notebooks. Ultimately, the utility decided on the clamshell-style laptop notebooks with a touchscreen and magnesium alloy cases ¡ª 20 times stronger than traditional notebook plastic and five times stronger than titanium.

These ¡°Toughbooks,¡± made by Panasonic, have water-resistant keyboards, touchpads and displays; sealed ports; and shock-mounted hard drives. The fact that they are compatible with Verizon's wireless data network clinched it. Austin Energy initially ordered Toughbook CF-28s, and later, the next-generation CF-29s.