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Outages, WithOut the OutrageBuilding GIS into customer service to improve outage response

By Curtis Winner

F or a natural gas utility, there’s no greater customer service chal-lenge than an outage. Reliability is one of the primary reasons many businesses and homeown-

ers choose natural gas, so if the gas stops flowing it’s an especially surprising and unwelcome event.

That’s why, over the past several years, New Mexico Gas Co. has developed an outage response system that seamlessly integrates our ESRI GIS system with our customer service system. As a result, we’re more prepared than ever to quickly meet our customers’ needs, both day to day and in extraordinary system emergencies.

We started by collecting and record-ing the GPS location of our more than 500,000 customer meters, which are spread across 4,282 square miles covering every

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how technology is helping mobile workers serve customers better.

Fieldwork: state Of the art

With all the flashy field-workforce gadgetry available today, it’s sometimes easy to forget that even the most advanced technology is useless unless it serves the ultimate goal: serving the customer, as efficiently and effectively as possible. in this issue, two utilities discuss the ways in which smart technology solutions are help-ing them streamline their customer service efforts, with-out their spending a lot of money. First, there’s new mexico Gas co., which undertook a massive effort to record the location of more than 500,000 customer meters—and optimized its customer response capa-bilities in the process. next, Questar Gas tells how a single app boosted the productivity of the company’s field collections team, saving Questar and its custom-ers a bundle. Finally, writer Gary James describes some of the latest software upgrades and introductions that improve the links between the field, the office, and, ultimately, the customer. —Jennifer Pilla Taylor

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corner of the state. For many years, we’ve had about 80 percent of our customers located on our maps with our GIS system placed through address geocoding technol-ogy. But, especially in some more rural service areas, the meter can be hundreds of feet from the house. We needed a system that could get our field technicians closer than a football field away from the meter.

For three months in 2011, meter readers on their regular routes used their regular handheld meter reading devices to record the location of every meter—add-ing an average of only about 16 seconds per reading. Today, with those coordinates we can reliably get within 15 to 20 feet of every meter on our system. That’s not as close as some more complex, expensive methods might have gotten us. But we have found it is more than adequate to enable field technicians to find the meter quickly. Especially when we have mutual assistance crews from outside the area helping us, it’s certainly better than telling them go down County Road 72, turn right, and look behind the second sage-brush. And the coordinates can be entered into any GPS tool, from a sophisticated $5,000 device to a 99-cent iPhone app.

Once we’d collected the GPS location data, the next challenge was to integrate it

so that it could function across our com-pany’s systems. NMGC built a geometric network from our distribution mains within our GIS system, which connects the pipe segments to the meter points and is used for tracing affected segments and their associ-ated customer meters during an outage.

Over the past two to three years, we’ve seen the value of this project in helping us to quickly and effectively respond to outages. Just this past January, we had an incident in which a third party damaged one of our supplies lines to the rural town of Clayton, at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon.

Using our GIS system, we were able to identify all of the more than 1,200 meters downstream of the damage that would lose service. We have developed scripts that join these meters with our customer information system, which feeds those customers’ phone numbers into our automatic dialer system. Our communica-tions team prepared a message alerting customers to the crisis, and within 90 minutes—even before many knew they had lost service—customers began receiv-ing phone calls from NMGC. We estimate we reduced calls into our customer call center by at least tenfold.

At the same time, we were generating re-light lists with those X and Y coordi-

nates, and began mobilizing field crews from around the state. Within 16 hours, service was restored to every customer.

We were able to act swiftly because we had prepared, conducting quarterly outage drills. But we will also be more prepared next time because of the metrics our system can generate after an incident that tell us how we could have done better. For example, we found that nearly 18 percent of the customers in the affected area of Clayton did not receive a call because they didn’t have a current primary telephone number on file. That’s an opportunity for further follow-up.

One of the most notable things about our system is that it was created entirely in-house. This saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and has given our staff a sense of investment. If it breaks, we know how to fix it. And we’ll continue improving it because, while our customers understand that some outages may be unavoidable, it is our responsibility to get the gas flowing again as quickly as possible.

Calmly COlleCtedSmartphone app slashes collections cost and bad debt

By Mike Favero

t en iPhones and one app have contributed greatly to reducing Questar Gas’s field-collection costs and bad debt by nearly one-third and increased productivity

nearly 600 percent over the past decade. Long gone are the days of picking up

a stack of collection orders, going from place to place on a best-guessed route, and returning to the office, sometimes with uncompleted work. Over the past decade, we navigated through several field-collec-tion hardware and software options, finally settling on the most reasonable one, which happened to be the most inexpensive—an iPhone and the ClickMobile app.

After an outage in rural Clayton, NMGC was able to use its GIS system to identify all of the meters downstream of the damage that would lose service.

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In 2004, best practices called for incen-tive-based pay for field collectors—it was all about speed and efficiency. We started pay-ing our collectors by the number of orders they completed. In a good day, a collector might complete 40 orders. Determining the most efficient route depended on a collector’s ability to organize the workload. And at the end of the day, our collectors spent about an hour entering orders into the customer information system.

Over the next few years, we increased productivity by implementing a commer-cial-mapping system into our network-connected laptops. Collectors were com-pleting as many as 140 orders per day—so much work that backfilling our collector positions was often unnecessary.

In 2010, it was time for a technology up-grade: faster laptops, improved connectivity, integrated software, and quality support. As expected, the price was too high. Our group began looking at smartphones and ways to incorporate workforce-management software already being used in our operations area. Software developer ClickSoftware was already working on an app called ClickMo-bile that would run on iOS and Android, so a few of our collectors began testing it. The software’s routing engine offered such great features that the collectors began using it to create their work routes. This means the dispatched orders on their phones now had the same sequence as the previously used mapping system.

We made our decision to move for-ward. The company purchased iPhones for all collectors in 2011 and pays the monthly bill for the phone and data plan. Collectors needed to establish their own iTunes accounts to load the ClickMobile app. As a side benefit, they are allowed to use the phones for personal use and down-load other apps and music at their own expense. The iPhones and app worked flawlessly from the start, and collectors were pleased to turn in their old phones, laptops, and air cards.

Our experience has been great. The

When gas utilities require actionable infor-mation from their vehicles, assets, custom-ers, workers, and partners, there’s a host of powerful software available to enhance connectivity between the field and the back office. software vendors continue to enhance capabilities with new mobile applications, maps, and other features, allowing supervi-sors and operations teams to more easily visualize vehicles, assets, and workers. The result is faster, more informed decision making that enables utilities to derive greater value from their investment, realize the full potential of their workforces, and serve their customers better. Here’s a quick look at recent introductions and enhancements as identified by experts at each of the vendors.

Fleet 11, the latest major upgrade to Aliso Viejo, calif.-based Telogis’s comprehensive cloud-based software platform, allows gas utilities to more easily analyze and utilize

data gathered from workers, vehicles, and assets in the field. The Telogis platform provides dynamic routing, commercial-grade navigation, advanced telematics, and real-time work-order management. The product also features mobile application enhance-ments and new maps that are optimized for mobile devices, allowing supervisors and operations leads to visualize vehicles, assets, and workers easily. Fleet 11 also supports Telogis Live 2.0, a location and data-sharing tool that connects partners’ and contractors’ workers and assets on one screen.

itron Analytics for Gas, new from itron inc., in Liberty Lake, Wash., is a managed

NeW teChNOlOgies fOr maNagiNg the field

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Below: Telogis’ upgraded Fleet 11 platform provides real-time routing and work order management. Right: Cathodic protection analysis is among the features in Itron’s new Analytics for Gas program.

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iPhones stay charged all day. Connectivity is better than that previously provided by air cards. Completed orders are relayed to our CIS in real time. Customer care reps have up-to-the-minute account informa-tion when customers call. Last-minute payments can cancel out a collector’s order. An additional in-house app synced to our service-line maps allows collec-tors to see their location in relation to a customer’s meter, making it easier to find difficult addresses. Collectors can also use their phones to communicate through iMessages, log work hours, and access company email.

Yes, there were some significant costs with the transition to iPhones, but we have realized significant savings and convenience. Our collections department went from 15 to 10 full-time collectors because technology allowed employees to make better use of their time. We serve nearly 1 million customers. When leaving shut-off notices, our top collectors are able to complete more than 250 orders in a good day. Even when shutting off service (that’s still a hard thing to say, especially when it’s cold), a collector can work nearly 100 orders during peak periods.

The bottom line: We’re now complet-ing collection orders much more quickly, which helps manage past-due balances. Before implementing our new processes, we had to restart a 45-day collections process on bills that weren’t completed on schedule.

Last year, collectors completed nearly 200,000 shut-off notices and more than 25,000 shut-offs, which is more than 99 percent of the company’s dispatched orders. The combination of incentive-based com-pensation, iPhones, and ClickMobile has proven to be more efficient, far more user-friendly and less expensive to operate than anything else the company has seen. u

Curtis Winner is director of project manage-ment and applications at New Mexico Gas Co. Mike Favero is credit and collections manager at Questar Gas in Salt Lake City.

Above: Clevest’s new partnership with Sierra Wireless gives utilities a single mobile platform for managing field work. Right: Aclara’s new iiDEAS solution provides a summary of operational data in one easy-to-read dashboard.

service analytic application that uses data from itron’s gas meters, communications modules, and sensing devices to provide actionable intelligence and insights that help utilities improve operational efficiencies and asset management. itron Analytics for Gas features a data store optimized for analytics, business intelligence dashboards, and gas utility-specific analytics. modules for revenue protection, district metering, and cathodic protection help utilities better manage the delivery and use of gas. itron says the analytic application has a simple, intuitive user interface to allow gas utility personnel to easily access and analyze critical informa-tion about their system.

Aclara’s new iiDeAs solution streamlines utility business processes in operations, customer support, and meter data man-agement by combining and unifying data from multiple sources, including advanced metering infrastructure and legacy advanced meter reading systems. The iiDeAs solution supports all Aclara Ami networks, and, with the use of available adapter pack-ages, a number of third-party Amr and Ami networks. According to the st. Louis-based company, the ability to connect third-party systems through adapters eases the transi-tion from older technology to Aclara and enables hybrid Ami solutions that achieve

100 percent service-area coverage seam-lessly. The iiDeAs solution supports current Web browsers and offers utility-customizable menus, dashboards, schedules and valida-tion, estimation, and editing rules.

clevest solutions has joined sierra Wireless’s recently launched solution Partner Program to provide wireless solutions to the utility industry. As an sPP Gold Partner, Plano, Texas-based clevest will offer sierra Wireless AirLink wireless gateways and modems with its mobile Workforce management and Automatic Vehicle Location solution, giving utilities a single mobile platform for wirelessly managing field work. Through the new program, utility dispatchers and supervisors can use clevest software to assign more than 100 different types of orders to the field and to manage field operations directly from a map-based view of vehicles and Gis assets. By closing the gap between the field and the office, the mobile solution helps utilities drive greater efficiencies, improve responsiveness, and enhance worker safety, according to the company. —Gary James