Vectren Energy Delivery Enacting Centralized Scheduling, Dispatch Operations

ViryaNet Ltd. has announced a major expansion with Vectren Energy Delivery. Vectren is a gas and electric utility serving more than one million customers in Indiana and Ohio.

Vectren has been using the ViryaNet mobile workforce management solution, for its short cycle service work for more than five years.

"The ViryaNet product has allowed us to truly optimize our service workforce and accommodate the complexity of break-in emergency work," explained Rick Schach, Vectren's vice president of energy delivery. "Vectren's scheduling operations have historically been divided into three silos; service, construction and outage, each with its own work orders and its own method of optimizing and scheduling those orders. Our focus now is getting all work onto a single platform and apply the same optimization concepts for our construction, maintenance and compliance workforce."

In the first phase of this major project, ViryaNet will implement the G4 version of its mobile workforce management solution for Vectren's construction, maintenance and compliance work. Phase two of the project will focus on consolidating the various Vectren scheduling and mobile platforms onto the ViryaNet G4 technology. When phase two is complete, Vectren will have a single mobile workforce management solution and perform all scheduling and optimization on one powerful platform. The new implementation more than doubles Vectren's field service crews being scheduled by ViryaNet technology.

"Consolidating the information systems that manage the variety of field service operations has been contemplated in our industry for some time, but the vendor's products were not there" explained Dan Bugher, Vectren's vice president of information technology and customer service. "Like so many others, we have multiple mobile technology platforms. We spent significant time shaping our mobile strategy to align with our future business needs. The ViryaNet technology was the best choice to consolidate platforms and reduce the complexity. This integrated platform supports long cycle, short cycle and 'break-in' work and will allow Vectren to improve our responsiveness to customer needs and provide new field technology such as advanced mapping and redlining.