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Improving Field Services 2008
Automation is Making Inroads
Field Service plays an essential role in linking customers to a utility. Most Field Service organizations are responsible for connecting and disconnecting service, when customers move in, out, or around the company’s service territory. In addition, Field Service often assumes the responsibility for disconnecting customers for non-payment and reconnecting meters once accounts are brought current.
Aside from connecting and disconnecting, Field Service employees become the key investigative resource for a utility—to understand problems with an account, obtaining usage readings for customers and to support internal billing, investigating potential leaks, delivering disconnection notices, identifying tampering, and often collecting in the field. Many Field Service organizations also fill an important role as first responders in emergencies and service outage incidents. Field Service is the critical liaison between the customer premise and the utility.
Field Service is typically responsible for obtaining any readings required outside the billing cycle—to initiate and finalize accounts, or to investigate high usage—and often, for obtaining re-reads to correct a reading and enable billing. The introduction of AMR (Automated Meter Reading) or AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) technologies can directly eliminate much of the special reads and reread work of Field Service. More sophisticated AMI or smart-metering devices can even accomplish some of the physical on-site Field Service workload through remote service connects and disconnects and tamper/theft detection.
However, until this level of automation is implemented on a wide-scale basis, most companies are left with the need to send an employee into the field to provide these services on an as-requested or as-needed basis to serve customers and keep the business running. Additionally, once AMI/AMR is implemented, Field Service duties shift to AMI/AMR meter maintenance.
Customer expectations for faster or even instant service are putting more and more demands on field service organizations, making it more difficult to ensure on-time arrival and high productivity. In addition, the recent U.S. economic downturn has made it harder for Americans to pay for basic purchases, including utility and telecommunication services, placing more demands on field service organizations to provide revenue collection enforcement for the company to minimize risk.
Utilities are also faced with growing need for more timely access to energy usage information—to support real-time pricing initiatives, load forecasting, demand-side management, load control, competition, and customer demand. Additionally, status and usage information is needed on an event basis to improve reliability and power quality, or to identify outages or theft of service. These more complex data requirements are driving the need for advanced metering systems, smart metering, and field automation.
Clearly the Field Service organization must evolve with the introduction of automation and continually look for ways to be more efficient and effective, and our study demonstrates that this is occurring. Most utilities are focusing on four basic approaches to field service improvement:
- Implementing automated mobile dispatch systems or service order management systems to better manage staffing and balance workload.
- Tying field laptops or other mobile devices into the Customer Information System to provide real-time information and update capabilities in the field.
- Reducing costs through productivity improvement, elimination of field trips, cross training, and safety improvement initiatives.
- Automated meter reading or smart metering – whether it’s a large-scale implementation or AMR/AMI to address “high read cost” meters, unsafe meter locations, and high-turnover premises, any degree of automation lightens the load on Field Service organizations. Remote disconnect/connect technologies dramatically reduce field trips, especially for utilities with high levels of delinquencies or seasonal transition.
To better understand how utilities are dealing with the challenges facing the Field Services function and its day-to-day operations, the Ascent Group conducted its second annual benchmarking project to evaluate Field Service performance and practices. Fifty-one companies participated in the research. Study participants range in size from 3,500 Field Service orders annually to as many as 2.8 million. The majority of study participants were from the United States, however we did one utility from Thailand and another from New Zealand.The following pages summarize our research. The full study, Improving Field Services 2008, is available for purchase on our website at www.ascentgroup.com.
Study Findings & Recommendations
Field Automation Increases Productivity and Effectiveness. Automating service order fulfillment is an effective way to reduce cost, improve safety, and increase customer satisfaction. Systems easily eliminate manual entry of field-collected data, make data available on a real-time basis to both the field and the office, reduce errors, and eliminate the paper piles. Auto dispatching further reduces the need for manual dispatch and frees up valuable radio waves for more critical communications. GPS and GIS add further mapping and least-cost routing benefits, which can play a critical role in training.
Automation also brings more robust performance measures for field service. Management can track order completion times, productive time, travel time, service level performance, appointments met and missed, as well as backlog.
Forty-three percent of our participants have implemented some form of field automation—mobile dispatch systems, laptops, field service handhelds, or automated service order processing. Another 31 percent have some form of field service automation plans in the works. Clearly field automation is gaining ground.
Setting Service Level Goals and Service Order Priorities Enable Field Service Organizations to Keep their Commitments. It is critical that service organizations issue field service orders wisely. Many problems can lead to an ineffective service order system, including a lack of priority working service orders, impatient or poorly trained customer service or billing representatives, and the failure to work or close service orders on a timely basis. When any of these occur, unnecessary or out of date service orders can quickly pile up and overwhelm the system, rendering it virtually useless. A sign that this is happening is when duplicate orders are placed, communications with dispatchers increase in the hopes of gaining priority on an order, “special request” service orders are used improperly in an effort to move to the top of the service order pile.
Field Service organizations must set realistic service level goals for all order types to ensure that all service orders are worked in a timely manner. Identifying high priority service order types is the first step in setting these goals. For instance, working all Service On orders on the same day as requested. This goal will help focus your organization to do all that is possible to complete these orders on the date requested, including making sure there are enough employees available to perform the work.
It’s equally important that all service order requests are worked or properly addressed so orders don’t hang in the system perpetually. Keeping a close watch on backlog and order age should help Field Service organizations keep their commitments.
Look for Opportunities to Reduce Field Trips Our participants were asked to identify any recent improvements that have helped to reduce trips to the field. Toping the list, and no surprise, the implementation of AMR/AMI technologies (27 percent). Automating service order routing and assignment was also equally as popular a field trip reduction technique among our panel. Twenty-three percent of companies mentioned initiatives to implement automated dispatch and service order management software and hardware.
Field automation offers many opportunities to optimize and even eliminate service orders. However, there is opportunity to reduce the number of field trips through process improvement and training. Companies should search diligently for ways to eliminate trips through better data integration between service order request system and billing system. For instance, systems can automatically match read in/read out orders and soft close accounts through the use of estimates or prorated readings.
Work with other groups within Customer Service to make sure that the service order system is being used wisely. Customer service representative training can be enhanced to encourage agents to cover the bases on all calls, before issuing a service order request for a check reading. Many companies offer “high bill complaint” training that helps representatives discuss usage and work with customers to better understand how services are being used in an attempt to eliminate unnecessary field trips.
Review your current business processes that affect the number of orders sent to the field in a continuing effort to identify opportunities to eliminate or reduce trips to the field.
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