At 1 a.m., one of Dominion Virginia Power's operations centers learns a pole is down with wires lying across a road. A first responder immediately heads to the scene and quickly determines a line crew is needed to make repairs. Within seconds, Dominion launches an automated callout programmed to apply a complex set of rules governing whom to call and in what order. Minutes later, the callout system has assembled a crew, and the line workers are on their way to the scene to make repairs. By sunrise, the pole is up, the power is restored and the crew returns to the office. The crew members dial into the callout system and record their status.

Callouts have been happening with this speed and efficiency at Dominion since September 2002.

The Old Way

Prior to 2002, Dominion Virginia Power, like many utilities, relied on a manual process to assemble its distribution line crews for after-hours emergencies. When supervisors received word of a power outage in the middle of the night, they reacted by grabbing a paper list and phoning one crew member at a time to assemble a crew as quickly as possible. The feeling was equal parts urgency and frustration as the caller dialed one home phone number or pager after another, moving down the list contacting available line personnel in the prescribed order based on a variety of work rules. Assembling a crew could sometimes take hours, thus increasing restoration time. In addition, Dominion had different callout practices in many of its offices.

In 1998, Dominion generated, transmitted and distributed electricity to approximately 2 million homes and businesses within a 30,000-sq mile (77,700-sq km) area in Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. That year, the utility decided that executing its callout process for such a large service area needed to be simpler, faster and more accurate.

Developing a New Callout Plan

Dominion Virginia Power and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 50 assembled a joint-action team to negotiate a set of callout rules for the utility's 35 offices. Out of the negotiations came a 22-page document with callout guidelines that were consistent yet still complex. The new callout procedures were put into place, but the callout process was still manual. Dominion wanted to pursue a more-expedient way of executing callouts.

Safety, continuous improvement, transparency and common sense are inherent to Dominion's culture, and the utility considered each of these factors as it looked to further improve its callout process. In 2002, Dominion's information technology department put together a request for information to support the effort to automate its callout system.

After evaluating a number of vendors, Dominion selected ARCOS Inc., a software vendor that could not only handle Dominion's complex union rules but also automate callouts in a fast and efficient way. The software from ARCOS could identify and automatically call hundreds of available line personnel in seconds, analyze and track responses, and report on the outcome.

Among the utility's primary concerns was how moving from a manual callout process to a computerized process would be perceived by the employees who would be called. Dominion's implementation team visited each office to explain how the new system would work. Uppermost in the minds of the Dominion managers was to not alienate the employees who would be receiving the calls and upon whose response customers depended.

Moving to Automated Callouts

In the summer of 2002, Dominion implemented the new callout system across its service area. As the utility turned on the system, management braced itself for any problems. Dominion put a computer kiosk in every office so employees could see callouts that were initiated the night before. All of the system issues that surfaced were addressed immediately and resolved with the close support of ARCOS. The rollout went according to plan, and the implementation was a success.

The earliest benefit of Dominion's automated callout system was the consistency it provided. When line personnel were needed in the evening or overnight, the operations centers were able to tap into the callout system to make hundreds of calls with the click of a mouse the same way every time. Along with reaching the right people as the joint-action plan had prescribed, the system automatically built an audit trail for message receipt and acknowledgement. Furthermore, Dominion's negotiated callout rules were precisely coded in the software's business rules to ensure accuracy on every callout.

Within a year of launching the system, Dominion Virginia Power began using ARCOS to call out salaried employees. In recent years, the system has become a way to handle callouts as well as to predict resource levels needed to accurately schedule work. Today, the callout system stores information on approximately 7000 employees. As Dominion moved to get all of its data in one place, the utility evolved from callout to crew tracking, and its callout system evolved with it.

A Role Beyond Callouts

Dominion learned Florida Power & Light was considering using ARCOS to track storm-related jobs, which were assigned in addition to normal duties. Dominion liked the concept and decided to use its system to create at least 18 different storm roles for every one of its offices. The callout system now keeps an accounting of personnel activated for a storm and tracks which employees are working an event as well as those who have not yet been assigned.

The system was purely about callouts when Dominion first implemented it in 2002. But through a partnership, in which Dominion encouraged ARCOS to develop new capabilities and ARCOS agreed to take the software development risks, the system gradually evolved into a resource management system for the utility's everyday work and for storm events.

Since implementing the callout system, the utility's response time has improved because crews are assembled and dispatched in minutes rather than hours. And Dominion's dispatchers, who in the past were saddled with taking part in the callout process, can now focus on restoration and providing customers with information about the outage.

The callout system has become an essential tool at Dominion. As part of a 2005-2006 Six Sigma study, Dominion determined that the callout system was at the core of knowing what was going on with the utility's workforce. None of the utility's other systems know the work status of individual employees better than the callout system.