Touch and Go!!!!

Introduction
Within the Netherlands, a concentrated effort has been applied at all levels of government to ensure that large-scale basemaps of the whole country be made available in digital format to all utilities and municipalities. The result has been that utility organizations have been able to quickly implement GIS that in combination with these maps has sped up the process of digitizing the networks.

Early Returns of Investments were made on the basis of capturing all.this data into a single repository. Thus the Engineering and Planning tasks associated with the data justified the need for the GIS. As hardware and soflware technology improved, Returns on Investments were recalculated on a basis that this data could be exploited throughout the organization.

In order to accomplish this, a multistage process was initiated within the industry. First, only workstations were provided with a connection to the database. It was a simple method of exploiting the use of the data internal to utility organizations but was also very expensive in that full blown GIS workstations were required to accommodate this construction. Second, desktop applications for viewing, querying, changing attribute data and adding some redline data became the requirement. This construction identified the need for GIS Lite software that could be priced more attractively to the volumes required here. However, GIS vendors relented in providing a solution where the full blown GIS could have been used while GIS Lite vendors were faced with the need to natively read or translate GIS data while providing only limited functionality. Then the Internet craze took over. Thin client applications for viewing, querying over the internet and even analyzing were the norm.

Nowadays it is possible to have a direct data link between someone in the field and the office. In the terminology of the utility industry, field engineers can now communicate with the dispatcher’s office to send and receive digital data as opposed to only speaking via the telephone or radio. Like any professional service organization, a utility wants to ensure the customers satisfaction. The Touch and Go concept can help you to achieve this.

The Concept
One of the most important business processes within a utility organization is the efficiency in which it attempts to minimize or even eliminate client disruptions. The conventional method has inherent and obvious disadvantages. Occasionally, utility company personnel must travel to a location to determine the problem, write up a report and hand it off to a supervisor who in turn determines when and by whom it can be repaired.

However, for every instance of maintenance, the Technician from the utility organization must go to a specific office location to obtain issued cards and/or work orders, which costs a lot of unnecessary effort and time. Since Technicians are on the road and return to headquarters only daily, it is difficult to add a work order. Management of available parts in inventory as well as on hand is not a simple undertaking. Administration of work orders and disruption registration forms is very slow and cumbersome. Furthermore, providing the necessary information, like GIS data and drop wire (connection) sketches to the Technicians on paper is costly and time consuming.

With the current information and communication technologies available, it is now very easy to realize a solution that greatly eases the above process. Such a solution has been realized that by far meets or exceeds the demands of these times, especially in time savings and cost effectiveness. An implementation of an actual Work Order Management system including the integration of the GIS data and associated drop wire sketches provides the solution, The solution is composed of a base workstation for the Service Manager at the office and a mobile computer for every Technician. This mobile computer could be a laptop as well as a pen based computer with all the information necessary for the Technician to do his job. These computers can remotely accept planned work orders or assignments on any given day at any given time along with the geographical information system data and the associated drop wire sketches. To make it easy finding the address of a client, the Technician also has a map of the streets of his service area.

The system must have an Open Architecture, with extensive support for native data formats, an elaborate on line help system and compatible with Office packages such as MS-Office or Corel Suite. Scheduling, Work orders exchange, used parts list, used hours on the job, travel time are all types of information exchanged with the base station. Standardization ensures compatibility with all kinds of extensions like barcode readers, label printers and so on.

In a basic setup the following entities are involved: a base station (the planner’s or dispatchers office) and one or more satellite/ mobile stations (the car of a field engineer or even his home office).