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Company Peoples Natural GasIndustry Utilities - GasLocation United States

TABLET-BASED SOLUTION TACKLES INEFFICIENCIES

Peoples Natural Gas provides gas service to approximately 700,000 homes and businesses in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Its infrastructure includes thousands of regulating stations, valves, and other assets that have to be inspected by field staff. In addition, the company regularly has to find and mark the location of its gas lines to accommodate excavation and construction projects across its service territory.

BACKGROUND

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CHALLENGELEVERAGING EXISTING SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS WITH MOBILE DEVICE UPGRADE

Peoples Natural Gas, a Pennsylvania-based utility, wanted to eliminate paperwork from its field inspection and damage prevention processes. Much of the software the company needed for its mobile solution was already in place when the IT staff began looking for the new mobile hardware.

The company was already using TransLore Locate software for damage prevention activities, and simply needed to port that application from the laptops to the new tablets. Peoples was able to use its existing FieldSmart View mapping solution to provide access to map/GIS (geographic information system) information, as well as to build the inspection forms. The company had also already deployed the Ventyx Service Suite system for work order management — it just wasn’t using the mobile application of the solution. The mobile component, which ties directly into the back office Ventyx solution the company was already using, was something that could simply be added on to the portions of the solution the company was already leveraging.

What the company needed to mobilize these activities was a rugged tablet that could withstand the often harsh conditions the technicians work in, provide enough processing power to meet the company’s needs, and run multiple Windows-based applications.

SOLUTIONTABLETS TAKE OVER

After evaluating various tablet options, Peoples selected and deployed the Motion F5 by Xplore rugged tablet. Pachuta and Brado headed up the hardware selection team. They tested several different devices out in the field, and used the feedback they received from their mobile workforce to guide their selection.

“The thing that really sold us on the Motion by Xplore tablet was, first and foremost, that it could handle the software we were

BENEFITSImproved inspection data accuracy

Reduction in paperwork and paper waste

Time savings amount to hours per week

Real-time access to up-to-date information

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running,” Pachuta says. “It also had the most user friendly form factor.” Once the F5 was selected, the company also needed to ensure a real-time wireless connection to the field. To do so, Peoples Natural

Gas has deployed Sierra Wireless GX440 modems in all of the technicians’ vehicles. The applications used in the field enable technic ians to work offline when they are out of wireless coverage, and data is synced back up with the server when they enter coverage again.

According to Brado, the company pi loted the solution in one field office with four users. “We let

them run about two months to make sure the solution was going to work the way we intended it to, and then once we were comfortable it was, we started rolling out the other locations one by one,” Brado says. “The phased rollout took about three months to complete.”

TRAINING KEY TO OVERCOMING CHALLENGES WITH EMPLOYEE ACCEPTANCE

In the first phase, Peoples Natural Gas deployed 100 rugged tablets. Pachuta says the biggest challenge the company faced was employee training. Many of the technicians using the devices had very little computer experience, which made training a challenge — but crucial to acceptance and adoption. “Half of the people we rolled this solution out to had limited laptop experience or none at all, and this was the first time they had worked with a workforce management application like Ventyx,” Pachuta says. “It took some

additional training and time to get them comfortable with how to use the solution.” Training was conducted in small groups at each location, along with some one-on-one training when necessary. “We did more in-depth training with the supervisors so we could use them as our first point of contact for questions,” Pachuta. “We also leveraged our existing support network for IT problems.” For inspection work, the back-end management system generates work orders for all monthly inspections. Supervisors for each office assign the work to specific employees. The Ventyx system issues the work orders to the F5 tablets. “They open the order, and there is a button on the screen that takes them into the FieldSmart map and form,” Brado says. “They record inspection results in the form, and when they are done, they submit that electronically, it gets transmitted back to the server, and updates the management system back in the office.” The solution works slightly differently for damage prevention assignments. The service calls come via Pennsylvania’s One Call System, which manages requests for utility checks at excavation and building sites. As those calls come in, work order tickets are issued through the TransLore system. “They can use the TransLore system to check the map, find the location of the lines, and then mark them,” Brado says. Loading the new inspection forms was simply a matter of copying the original paper forms into the system. “We did take the opportunity to do a content review and made some minor changes to things on the old forms that were no longer relevant,” Brado says. “We also made it a better fit for the tablet interface in terms of layout.”

Poundland, Kilburn, London, United Kingdom

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Peoples needed to have asset histories attached to the valves and regulating stations in the inspection system so that the information could be accessed during new inspections, which meant migrating the existing paper trail into the electronic system. “We had a lot of paper documentation, sketches of valves, and inspection histories, and we had some college interns scan those documents into electronic form,” Brado says. “We attached those to individual valve and regulating station records, so the employees in the field can bring up those attachments and look at them.”

RESULTSELIMINATING PAPER SAVES HOURS OF TEDIOUS DATA ENTRY

Thanks to the F5 tablets and new mobile software, data capture is more efficient, and inspection data is immediately updated in the back office system. “There’s no paperwork floating around, and no extra data entry steps involved,” Brado says. “We have a real-time view of what’s happening in the field.” That real-time visibility has also helped improve efficiencies in other areas. “In the old process, there was a lot of wait time involved if we needed to update the information, Pachuta says. “If what they saw in the field didn’t match what was on the forms, they would have to call the office and go back and get a new map. With real-time access to current drawings, we have cut out that wait time and stopped a lot of that back and forth travel, and the unintentional errors that occur when you are looking at outdated information.” Back office data entry has been reduced, as the data on the 15,000 inspections the company conducts each year now flows seamlessly into the database. Office staffers have saved several hours per week in data entry time, and in addition to saving time the accuracy of the information is improved as well. “Our primary goal was improving accuracy,” Pachuta says. “We

wanted the least number of people to touch the data to minimize potential errors, and we’ve accomplished that goal.” Using rugged tablets, Peoples Natural Gas has been able to eliminate hours of data entry per week, improve the accuracy of inspection data, and provide real-time access to GIS map data that has made line location and inspection tasks more efficient. By leveraging existing software applications and modeling existing work flows, it was able to do so in the most cost-effective and least disruptive way, while creating a platform to expand mobility into other applications

WHAT’S NEXTPeoples is planning to roll out the solution to technicians working for another gas utility the company has acquired, and Brado says there are plans to further leverage the rugged F5 tablets for other applications within the organization. “ We have people that go out and do test readings for corrosion protection systems, and there are 25,000 test stations in the field they survey on a periodic basis,” Brado says. “We want to work that process into the mobile solution. Another big one is leak management. If there is a leak, we have to go out and investigate and generate repair orders. We want to automate all of that in the field using the tablets.”