A trio from Puget Sound Ener­gy cov­ered a series of cus­tomer and field ser­vice improve­ment projects with SAP tech­nol­o­gy at the core for an SRO audi­ence at last month’s ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Util­i­ties conference.

The ses­sion, which includ­ed recent progress improv­ing emer­gency ser­vices in fire and flood sit­u­a­tions, described PSE’s cus­tomer-focused ​“Get to 0” cam­paign, aimed at zero cus­tomer com­plaints and Inte­grat­ed Work Man­age­ment (IWM) ele­ments. in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton, PSE is the largest elec­tric­i­ty and gas provider in the state, with 3,000 employ­ees serv­ing 1.2 mil­lion cus­tomers in 10 ser­vice areas.

Bill Ess­er, PSE SAP Senior IT Ana­lyst, walked through the basics of PSE’s shift. His top­ics ranged from paper-based man­u­al process­es, using maps and work orders, to Microsoft Win­dows-based mobile devices and new appli­ca­tions used by field ser­vice per­son­nel to quick­ly syn­chro­nize with cen­tral­ized work order data. 

“SAP is the foun­da­tion, SAP is the mid­dle of every­thing, Work Man­ag­er oper­a­tions, opti­miz­ing work sched­ul­ing, Work Man­ag­er sched­ule, the mobile work­force,” Ess­er said, not­ing lat­er that PSE is cur­rent­ly on SAP ECC 6.0 and just begin­ning to plan its SAP S/4HANA upgrade.

Busi­ness and Part­ner Support

Ess­er con­veyed that ear­ly project phas­es, which involved part­ner sup­port from Accen­ture as well as impor­tant PSE busi­ness leader sup­port, show pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains. He said, pri­or to the changes, ser­vice per­son­nel spent three hours each day in office to opti­mize sched­ules for five hours of work in the field. Now a short, sim­ple stop in the office to upload and align ser­vice info and sched­ules gets per­son­nel to more cus­tomers more effi­cient­ly each day.

“We give con­fi­dence to the ser­vice team who make a com­mit­ment to make an appoint­ment, that they have the infor­ma­tion they need, and [for the cus­tomer] that ser­vice peo­ple will be there,” said Kahn Nguyen, SAP Senior IT Ana­lyst, and mem­ber of the speak­er trio. 

The team also list­ed addi­tion­al fea­tures and improve­ments in the project, includ­ing the use of ClickSoftware’s ClickSched­ule to sched­ule fol­low-up work, such as an engi­neer­ing review for an exist­ing cus­tomer; the abil­i­ty to add and edit attach­ments on job, such as tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion; adding visu­al indi­ca­tors to show appoint­ment date and time com­mit­ment on a map; and the abil­i­ty to sort work orders based on cat­e­go­ry to bet­ter man­age work load or pri­or­i­tize work based on prob­lem type.

Impor­tant to Day-to-Day Operations

“These may seem like sim­ple things, but they are impor­tant for day-to-day oper­a­tions,” Ess­er said. 

Also of increased impor­tance are util­i­ty response times and safe­ty pro­ce­dures, espe­cial­ly in nat­ur­al or man­u­fac­tured dis­as­ters. PSE’s Shereyas Shah, SAP Senior IT Ana­lyst, said the com­pa­ny has devel­oped an ​“auto­mat­ed storm mode” sys­tem to replace a man­u­al process for storm sce­nar­ios. SAP-based sys­tems now track, ana­lyze, and pri­or­i­tize respons­es to storm dam­age across the utility’s oper­at­ing districts. 

The trio also high­light­ed a cross-busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion sys­tem imple­ment­ed to con­nect process­es and safe­ty con­cerns when PSE’s Gas and Elec­tric works teams were at work near each other.

“We inte­grat­ed depart­ments that were not talk­ing to each oth­er,” Shah said. ​“Even though these teams are with­in the same com­pa­ny, they need to talk to each oth­er to have aware­ness of issues that are safe­ty critical.”