Abstract:
Today’s technology makes it possible to have your field engineers provide a level of customer service that you originally sold or promised. With a viable direct access to the network database, on-line status information and up-to-date work orders, service engineers and field technicians need only to visit the office for supplies. A properly designed field application allows supervisors to plan activities and jobs more easily yet keeping the field personnel in touch with their offices. Besides an easy-to-use application running on either a pen computer or a laptop, the reduction of administrative procedures improves productivity. A wireless data network link supports the servicemen with up-to-date information from the dispatcher’s office. To limit the communication costs, GIS data is stored on a hard disk that may be updated nightly, using ISDN, PSTN, GSM, ADSL etc. Status information of network components can be requested real time using this wireless data link. The system at the office shows the availability for service calls, progress reports and daily schedules. A map is displayed of the area in which a company’s service engineers are operating. Dispatchers can assign new jobs, change appointments, add additional information, and conduct part-availability inquiries. Benefits are gained in a variety of ways such as travel times, operating procedures and customer satisfaction.

Mobile Field Computing
Today’s technology makes it possible to have your field engineers provide a level of customer service that you originally sold or promised. With a viable direct access to the network database, on-line status information and up-to-date work orders, service engineers and field technicians need only to visit the office for supplies. A properly designed field application allows supervisors to plan activities and jobs more easily yet keeping the field personnel in touch with their offices. Besides an easy-to-use application running on either a pen computer or a laptop, the reduction of administrative procedures improves productivity. A wireless data network link supports the servicemen with up-to-date information from the dispatcher’s office. To limit the communication costs, GIS data is stored on a hard disk that may be updated nightly, using ISDN. Status information of network components can be requested real time using this wireless data link. The system at the office shows the availability for service calls, progress reports and daily schedules. A map is displayed of the area in which a company’s service engineers are operating. Dispatchers can assign new jobs, change appointments, add additional information, and conduct part-availability inquiries. Benefits are gained in a variety of ways such as travel times, operating procedures and customer satisfaction.

Within the GIS industry, a concentrated effort has been applied at all levels of government to ensure that large-scale base maps 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 software 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 solution described below can help you to achieve this.

The Solution
The GIS industry needs to seamlessly integrated dispatch, mobile data, scheduling, and outage management solution. Every utility organization wants to increase efficiency across the entire enterprise. Implementing a single dispatching and mobile data environment to support both commercial and operational needs yields a remarkable return on investment, including greater efficiency in managing field-based personnel, reduced implementation complexity, and significantly lowered cost of system ownership.

This multipurpose application provides a tightly integrated workflow that supports the business processes associated with dispatching work to field crews. Users can analyse, schedule, and dispatch service-related work from a single environment, eliminating the traditional barrier between commercial and operational organizations and providing customers with superior service response.

Dispatching Module
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 kinds of extensions like barcode readers, label printers and so on. In a basic set-up 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).

Main functions

The product concept consists of components that are responsible for specific, related sets of functions. The system components communicate with each other via messaging, which is the optimal method for network communication. The dispatch environment supports:

• Interfaces to real-time alarm systems, such as cable, pressure, and equipment alarms.
• An interface to existing customer call-centres.
• An extremely fast and highly functional map display that is tightly integrated with the system’s tabular displays.
• Integration with the as-built facility model maintained in the GIS.
• The ability to dispatch multiple types of work, not just trouble-related orders. Users can manage the entire dispatching process from a single application environment. The system can be configured to enable a utility to dispatch service order-related work from one seat and to send operational work (such as trouble orders) to another. This implementation flexibility provides utilities the advantage of meeting all of their dispatch requirements within a single product line.
• The ability to extend dispatching capabilities to include near real-time display of vehicles using global positioning system (GPS) co-ordinates, dispatching to mobile data terminals (MDT’s), and dispatching via alphanumeric paging devices.
• High Availability

The following subsections discuss the listed components:

• Computer Aided Dispatch
• Dispatch System Interfaces
• Mobile Computing Systems
• Integration with GIS in general
• Real-Time Messaging