Utilities across the board strive to maximize worker productivity and reduce costs. Streamlining workforce management processes is one solution that can significantly improve the efficiency of a utility's workforce.

“In talking to utilities across the world, we see the same opportunities in the labor force,” says Ken Zagzebski, Industry Solutions Executive for T&D Utilities, Ventyx (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., www.ventyx.com). “Due to the complex and voluminous work environment, for convenience sake, utilities have historically sectioned work and people into organization silos; but to gain efficiency across the spectrum, utilities need to optimize the whole instead of the parts.”

“There is tremendous opportunity to become more efficient, but departmental turf and other cultural issues must be addressed first,” says Zagzebski. “Then there is a significant opportunity to optimize our resources by having a work management system that will enable utilities to do a better job and have the right materials, right equipment and a job site ready to work.”

Ventyx recently unveiled Service Suite 8.0, its first release of Service Suite following the combination of Indus and MDSI earlier this year.

Service Suite 8.0 leverages MDSI's Advantex enterprise workforce management platform, providing a true enterprise-wide workforce management solution that manages all types of field work, including service, maintenance, inspection, repair, trouble/outage and construction.

“In the last six months, we've been hearing more utilities talk about resource optimization through the use of scheduling tools,” says Zagzebski. “The industry wants scheduling tools that integrate with asset and work management systems to optimize productivity.”

The solution: “Enterprise Workforce Management,” interjects Steven Radice, Industry Solutions Executive for Utility Solutions, Ventyx. “In the past 5 to 10 years, mobile data has focused on customer service and outage work. We're looking at it now from a distribution enterprise perspective. Utilities are beginning to see the need for a single tool to assign, dispatch, manage and perform all aspects of work with the flexibility to look at work from a unified distribution enterprise standpoint.”

The Service Suite 8.0 release provides key enhancements to scheduling and dispatch tools, broader mobile support and enhanced business intelligence. New key features include:

• The Gantt chart feature enables dispatch users to see a graphical overview of shifts worked by mobile users and the orders assigned to those shifts. With a color-coded display of states and alerts and “hover” menus for more detail, the solution gives dispatch users a real-time view of current day orders and activities in the field and can trigger local optimization of workflows in the field as work orders are completed. As a result, the solution helps ensure efficient and timely assignment of work orders to appropriate technicians, optimizing schedules and minimizing unnecessary travel costs.

• Long-duration orders can be assigned on the Gantt chart manually, or the system can automatically assign the orders over one or more consecutive shifts.

• Java phones/PDAs and mobile Web services enable personnel with minimal order data and completion requirements, such as contractors and light users, to benefit by communicating with Service Suite via the Mobile Web services feature.

• Real-time data warehouse and operations dashboard offers easy access to real-time data to track and manage critical business operations.

“At our client utilities, the outage management system often interfaces with Service Suite. When a trouble order comes in, Advantex/Service Suite assigns and dispatches a specific tech or crew,” says Zagzebski. “ABB is our preferred partner, but we deal with all outage management system providers.”

Radice says that Southern Company (Atlanta) is a current user of an older version of the MDSI system, and is now installing Service Suite 8.0 across all of its operating companies.