At the kickoff for its 20th annual EMPOWER user conference, ARCOS® LLC, which provides workforce management solutions for utilities and other critical infrastructure industries, has launched two new products for building the digital utility of the future. The first is ARCOS Mobile Workbench for Construction, which replaces paperwork, phone calls and emails with a digital collaboration hub that utility employees can open anywhere to design, construct, manage, and close out capital projects. The second new product announced by ARCOS is Utility Insight, which gathers and analyzes data from across a utility and creates a set of “work views” that includes information from ARCOS and any other IT platforms.
Most utilities separately manage construction, maintenance, outages, and restoration, which fragments any view of operations and impedes safety, reduces reliability, and hamstrings containing costs.
“Our data from utility customers shows that advanced mobile workforce management solutions cut windshield time for workers and halve the time it takes to plan and assign work,” said John Villali, research director for IDC Energy Insights. “These solutions provide utility CEOs and COOs with a global, minute-by-minute view of the condition and fiscal health of their system.”
According to Villali, utility construction and restoration work takes longer and costs more, in part, because workers lack real-time data on assets and work. Crews spend a lot of time waiting for materials and on administrative tasks like time-tracking. They also struggle with cumbersome processes for documenting, for example, as-built reports and plans and quickly updating systems of record with that information. With mobile workforce management solutions in place, IDC research showed fieldworker productivity climbed 15 to 25 percent and saw a 17-percent reduction in the time to inspect assets. With ARCOS Mobile Workbench for Construction, utilities can digitize how: managers plan and assign work; crews receive and carry out jobs; and back-office staff document outcomes and close completed jobs, says Villali.
“ARCOS Mobile Workbench for Construction gives utilities a digital solution for connecting their back office and field teams with a common set of tools and views that help them complete each phase of a capital project more safely, quickly, and cost-effectively,” said Lindsey Artman, chief product officer for ARCOS. “This product will help utilities accelerate revenue-generating capital projects.”
Another critical building block for the utility of the future is ARCOS’s Utility Insight platform, according to ARCOS. Utility Insight integrates and complements ARCOS solutions such as Mobile Workbench, Callout and Crew Manager to connect field and back-office staff for safe, efficient and reliable operations. Utility Insight pulls, caches, and analyzes data from virtually any source (e.g., OMS, GIS, AMI, etc.) and then delivers near real-time, actionable intelligence via easy-to-use dashboards for workers in the control room and field when and where they need it. Unlike traditional dashboard tools, Utility Insight enables users to easily act from the same interface – such as initiating a callout or sending a notification to a field user through the ARCOS Mobile+ app.
“Utility Insight is a real-time analytics platform that arms managers and executives with what they need to deliver power reliably, every day and in every situation,” said ARCOS CEO Odus “Boogie” Wittenburg.
Learn more at http://www.arcos-inc.com.
