Workforce Management Featured Article

Trimble eRespond Cuts Repair and Response Time for Water and Wastewater Utilities

A leak on a water line, if you're a water company, is like watching money flow out of an open spigot. In technical terms, this lost water is called "non-revenue water" (NRW).

According to Industrial WaterWorld, about 22 percent of the water that the average water utility produces is NRW. Good companies can keep the percentage in the teens while companies with old, leaky infrastructure can experience losses in the 40 to 50 percent range.

Trimble's (News - Alert) new Incident and Outage Management Solution is designed to help both water and wastewater utilities minimize NRW by shortening repair time and improving field and office worker productivity.

Water and wastewater utilities typically already have enterprise systems like customer information systems (CIS), geographic information systems (GIS) and work management systems in place. Trimble's eRespond is designed to bridge all of these systems by giving an at-a-glance view into an outage situation without requiring a user to log into multiple systems.

In addition to integrating with legacy solutions, eRespond has its own work and resource management, call take and reporting capabilities.

One of the key features of Trimble eRespond for water utilities is its call grouping function. Instead of forcing utilities staff to deal with multiple reports of leakage, eRespond consolidates calls, event identification and localization algorithms for efficiency. It also prevents the creation of duplicate order tickets.

Another key feature is multi-modal display of fault information, including tabular, schematic and spatial displays. A direct link from the field to reporting prevents office workers from having to rehash reports for regulatory agencies. The solution monitors key event parameters in the background and can be configured to send out alerts in the event of an incident or outage.

With eRespond, Trimble hopes to help utilities to cut their regulatory fines and data collation efforts. The solution may also improve customer service.