Southern Company (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.), the super-regional energy company in the southeastern United States, has purchased InService for enterprisewide mobile workforce management.

Developed by Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions (Madison, Alababama, U.S.), InService will streamline dispatching and scheduling for routine service work. It will be Southern Company's platform for all field service work, involving about 1200 mobile users, 120 dispatchers and 480 Web-based supervisory dispatch seats. Without operator intervention, InService's autodispatch capability will perform same-day workload balancing of elements, such as crew location, shortest route, type of work, cost of service, customer priority and time. The utility will be able to optimize scheduling of its daily orders, which average 14,000, with a peak volume of approximately 24,000. Southern Company also plans to use InService to dispatch and manage complex work orders and outage management events that originate from existing systems.

Southern Company chose InService to replace the its legacy system for the following reasons:

• InService is flexible and open, allowing Southern Company to use HTML and Java Scripting to create forms and associated business logic on a mobile platform.

• Map data from different sources can be easily ported into InService and will look the same to users whether the platform is dispatch, mobile or Web.

• Map-based routing gives users the ability to view proposed routes quickly and further optimize crew response.

Prior to purchasing, Southern Company tested InService in its Business Application Testing Lab to evaluate how successfully the solution would integrate into the company's IT infrastructure.

Southern Company is the parent firm of five southeastern electric utilities: Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power and Savannah Electric. Through these utilities, the company serves 4 million customers across a 120,000-square-mile service territory spanning most of Georgia and Alabama, southeastern Mississippi and the panhandle of Florida.