The fol­low­ing guest per­spec­tive was authored by Mike Seblani, Solu­tion Lead — Enter­prise Mobil­i­ty at BC Hydro.

At the British Colum­bia Hydro and Pow­er Author­i­ty, a Cana­di­an elec­tric util­i­ty gen­er­at­ing and deliv­er­ing elec­tric­i­ty to over four mil­lion peo­ple, we recent­ly imple­ment­ed a con­sol­i­dat­ed mobile work man­age­ment plat­form. This would be an involved project for any orga­ni­za­tion. With that in mind, I’ll walk you through how we built the case for this project and our incre­men­tal imple­men­ta­tion approach. 

Over the past 10 years, BC Hydro has seen its work­force users go from using cou­ple of mobile appli­ca­tions on ruggedi­zed lap­tops to hav­ing 10 or more appli­ca­tions on mul­ti­ple devices to com­plete their dai­ly tasks. Yet many process­es con­tin­ue to be com­plet­ed on paper while lever­ag­ing inef­fi­cient solu­tions and man­u­al process­es, which rely heav­i­ly on back-office support.

We need­ed a mobile strat­e­gy and archi­tec­ture vision to enable our mobile work­force to work any­where, any­time, to com­plete the job onsite safe­ly and with an improved user experience. 

Through the for­ma­tion of a Mobile Cen­ter of Excel­lence (MCoE) at BC Hydro, we were able to inven­to­ry a vast num­ber of mobile use cas­es demand­ed by the busi­ness, relat­ed to both exist­ing and future needs. Estab­lish­ing the MCoE helped us iden­ti­fy key pain points and chal­lenges to focus on. Com­mon­ly iden­ti­fied reoc­cur­ring needs includ­ed the need for deep data inte­gra­tion into our enter­prise sys­tems, a sim­ple and con­sis­tent user expe­ri­ence, and the abil­i­ty to com­plete dai­ly field tasks with­out hav­ing to switch from one appli­ca­tion to the other. 

It did not mat­ter to our field work­ers whether data resided in one sys­tem or five. And through estab­lish­ing our Mobile Work Man­age­ment Solu­tion, we expect to pro­vide a guid­ed expe­ri­ence to exe­cute and com­plete tasks in var­i­ous work order types, compliance/​safety check­lists, GIS data updates, and much more.

We incor­po­rat­ed all the insights gath­ered through our MCoE into the fol­low­ing set of guid­ing prin­ci­ples to help for­mu­late the vision:

1. Ease of use for field workers
2. Con­sol­i­dat­ed plat­form address­ing most of busi­ness needs
3. Plat­form and ven­dor maturity
4. Effi­cien­cy of tech­nol­o­gy inte­gra­tion with SAP
5. Cross-func­tion­al geo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion sys­tem (GIS) compatibility
6. Home grown mobile apps and oth­er inspec­tion solu­tions replaced with a Com­mer­cial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) evolv­ing solution
7. Robust secu­ri­ty
8. Flex­i­ble and scalable
9. Cross-plat­form (mobile, tablet, desk­top web) 
10. Easy to cus­tomize and tai­lor to dif­fer­ent busi­ness groups’ requirements
11. Mod­ern­ized archi­tec­ture pro­mot­ing mobile shared ser­vices (com­pos­able ser­vices pack­aged into tar­get­ed mobile experiences)

What we want­ed is a new Mobile Work Man­age­ment plat­form that supports:

• Dif­fer­ent user work­flows (e.g. field work­er, field plan­ner, field manager)
• Dif­fer­ent types of work orders (e.g. restora­tion, inspec­tion, dam­age assessment)
• Dif­fer­ent types of labor (e.g. con­trac­tor, employee) 
• Abil­i­ty to enable seam­less online/​offline work
• Dis­sem­i­na­tion of rel­e­vant and accu­rate data 

From our expe­ri­ence build­ing cus­tom mobile appli­ca­tions over the years, we knew that the Mobile Work Man­age­ment plat­form had to offer a strong, evolv­ing inte­gra­tion lay­er to our ERP, GIS, out­age man­age­ment sys­tem (OMS), and enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment (ECM)/document repos­i­to­ry plat­forms. At the inte­gra­tion lay­er is where most chal­lenges and costs reside when it comes to build­ing and main­tain­ing mobile solutions

The dia­gram below depicts the core user func­tions we want­ed to focus on, cat­e­go­rized by the user roles. At the top of all the func­tions is user expe­ri­ence and at the bot­tom of the func­tions are key capa­bil­i­ties com­mon to all mobile applications:

The dia­gram below pro­vides an overview of the busi­ness process­es and func­tions that we were look­ing for the Mobile Work Man­age­ment plat­form to enable:

Since ERP and GIS are the two anchor­ing plat­forms for Mobile Work Man­age­ment, the plat­form had to have pre­built inte­gra­tion to our ERP (SAP) and our GIS (ESRI):

• SAP Inte­gra­tion – Mobile solu­tions should pro­vide both a field soft­ware solu­tion and inte­gra­tion com­po­nents that com­mu­ni­cate with SAP and the rel­e­vant mod­ules there­in. With­out this capa­bil­i­ty, BC Hydro would have to take on the com­plex chal­lenge of SAP integration. 
• GIS Inte­gra­tion – Mobile solu­tions should con­tain map views and geo-aware func­tion­al­i­ty. Where applic­a­ble, the inte­gra­tion of these map con­trols to BC Hydro back­end GIS data­bas­es should be dri­ven by con­fig­u­ra­tion and frame­works rather than cus­tom development.

We made the deci­sion to study the mar­ket for our tar­get future state, in which all our elec­tri­cal pow­er assets (Gen­er­a­tion, Trans­mis­sion, and Dis­tri­b­u­tion) will be sup­port­ed by SAP Enter­prise Asset Man­age­ment (EAM) and ESRI ArcGIS. After the study, we devel­oped a busi­ness case for a tech­ni­cal foun­da­tion­al project to acquire the Mobile Work Man­age­ment plat­form with a small pilot, to prove out the oper­at­ing mod­el. This proved nec­es­sary, since pre­vi­ous projects tend­ed to focus on a spe­cif­ic unit’s busi­ness needs rather than cross-func­tion­al and cross-busi­ness unit needs for enter­prise mobility. 

Through the com­pet­i­tive bid selec­tion process, we land­ed on SAP Field Ser­vice and Asset Man­ag­er, Mira­ta Forms, and Locana Lemur. This inte­grat­ed toolset gives us a great, for­ward-look­ing plat­form for our enter­prise mobil­i­ty needs. 

Now that the tech­nol­o­gy is in place, we are in a great posi­tion to deliv­er on our Enter­prise Mobil­i­ty and Mobile Work Man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy roadmap.

BC Hydro is a com­mer­cial Crown cor­po­ra­tion, owned by the Province of British Colum­bia and reg­u­lat­ed by the British Colum­bia Util­i­ties Com­mis­sion. Our cor­po­rate pur­pose is to pro­vide reli­able pow­er, at low cost, for gen­er­a­tions. It is one of the largest elec­tric util­i­ties in Cana­da, serv­ing more than 1.7 mil­lion cus­tomers in a diverse geo­graph­ic area con­tain­ing over 94% of British Columbia’s population.

BC Hydro has sev­er­al mobile work man­age­ment solu­tions includ­ing cus­tom-built Mobile tools for Spa­tial Asset Man­age­ment, Mobile Con­trac­tor work order in SAP, and many more mobile point solu­tions. These solu­tions tend to be busi­ness-unit-focused and have vary­ing capa­bil­i­ties for ERP inte­gra­tion, GIS, and the abil­i­ty to work offline for var­i­ous mobile devices and platforms.