IWC’S success in cost efective mobile applications
Jeff Dieterlen
Manager Planning & Systems Development
Indianapolis Water Company
Charline M Avey
Manager, Research & Development Utility Data Corporation
1220 Waterway Blvd PO Box 1220 Indianapolis, Indiana 46202
Summary
One of the nation’s largest water utilities has fully implemented customized Palm Computing
applications using off-the-shelf software and hardware at minimal cost. Serving over 260,000 customers in
central Indiana, IWC daily uses Palm devices for hydrant, valve testing and repair and field service customer
work orders. Field personnel with minimal computer experience have gone into 100% production within
hours of training with simple, effective Palm solutions. Over the past year, field data accuracy has
improved, obsolete equipment has been replaced and redundant paperwork has been eliminated.
Automating field activities is the “last mile” for utilities in their effort to have information on facilities and
services from cradle to grave. Including your field employees in the process of data collection benefits the
whole organization. These employees are your subject matter experts for your facilities and customers.
They know the most and if given the tools can accurately update your systems. The Palm platform is
flexible and robust enough to handle most field processing needs. Two features separate it from all the other
handheld platforms. One is the “hotsync” process. The Palm OS has the intelligence built in to recognize
changes in the handheld/desktop data and assures that each environment is kept current. The other is battery
life. Applications created for the Palm are much simpler to create because the operating system has taken
care of the complexity of staying in sync with your desktop applications.
IWC, with the help of Utility Data Corporation, has implemented one additional field
application for Customer Service and is in the process of creating three more for other
distribution work orders. UDC has also developed a stand-a-lone customer service
work order system called “Field Director” that includes Palm work order capabilities.
Additional applications are being planned with ongoing enhancements that include
wireless two-way communications with corporate customer service and GIS/mapping
databases to allow real-time updates to maps, status reports for managers and service
representatives.
Getting Started
Since 1999 Palm PDA’s have being used daily by 30 field employees at IWC.
Approximately 160,000 distribution system work orders and 69,000 customer
nonpayment work orders have been processed. No data has been lost through
hardware failure, and only three units have been replaced because of breakage. The employees were trained in-house for 1 hour and given Palms with demo data over a
weekend. On Monday, they were given a brief training sheet and sent on their route.
Most of the employees had little or no computer training prior to using the Palm
device. A nonpayment form was created to be similar to the computer card order;
however, enhanced interaction with the serviceman allowed greater information flow
and eliminated errors due to incorrect marking. The distribution system order forms
were greatly enhanced due to the ability of the developer to work with the department
heads to revamp the type of information collected in the field.
Software used to develop the Palm applications was Pendragon Forms developed by
Pendragon Software Corporation. This software uses Microsoft Access and allows
rapid application development as well as the conduit for communicating between the
Palms and backend databases. These databases can reside in Access as well as most
ODBC databases. One feature of Pendragon Forms is that it can import the structure
of database tables to create an initial form. The initial applications used Access on the
desktop to query and analyze the data. Several manual reports were eliminated for
both departments because they now had access to the raw field data in the Access
database. The report creation function was moved to the employee managers due to
fact that many of the managers were familiar with Access.
This success led to a much more ambitious project for IWC’s Customer Service
Department. The application automates fieldwork order processing for all work
preformed by 20 servicemen. The scope included integrating the Utilities new
customer information system UtiliSuite© developed by Utility Data Corporation and
the company wide work order management system Cassworks© developed by RJN.
Both systems are stored in Oracle 8i databases residing on Microsoft Windows 2000
servers. Pendragon Forms is used for Palm forms development, Pendragon
Distribution Toolbox for providing unlimited forms to unlimited users and Pendragon
SyncServer for wireless communication through the company web server. All palms
can hotsync across the LAN as well as hotsync by PC modems from remote locations
or Palm modem. Several other applications are used to ease the setup of the 30 Palm
V, PalmVx and Palm M505.
