Centric

Client Overview

A large electric utility serving 500,000 customers in a 6,000 square mile area was saddled with inefficient, paper-based processes that were  a drain on resources and negatively affected customer service.

Manual Labor

Each day 1,000-3,000 paper-based orders were mass printed from the Customer Service Systems (CSS), then distributed among five organizations and dispatched to 80 Field Technicians.  The Field Technicians completed the paper orders in the field and returned them to a Customer Service Representative at the end of the day for manual entry into the CSS.  Manual order completion was a time and resource intensive process. 

A Practical Solution

The utility sought help from the utilities experts at Practical Solutions (PSI), a business unit of Centric Consulting.  The project vision included the following:

• Automatic assignment, routing and download of service orders to Field Technicians’ hand-held devices
• Order upload via a WiFi access point sent directly to the CIS for completion
• A configurable, custom solution which achieved the desired functionality for a lower total cost than available packaged applications

By leveraging a partnership between the utility and experienced PSI consultants, Centric designed and developed a custom solution, which included the following activities:

• Project Planning
• Assistance with decisions regarding platform for the custom development
• Requirements Analysis
• Solution Architecture
• Design, Build, Test and Deploy
• Application Support Transition
• Trained/coached in-house developers

From Hours to Minutes

During the first month of production, approximately 22,000 orders were electronically completed without manually keying completion data into the CSS.  Order assignment and routing processes reduced from hours to minutes.  Turnaround time between work performed in the field and customer bill generation decreased significantly, and therefore, revenue was received sooner.