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Playing catch up
(Utility Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)
Implementing field force enablement tools can be difficult enough at the best of times. It is all too easy to get it wrong and leave staff disgruntled, or for the technology to fail to deliver the promised benefits. Embarking on such an implementation when there is root and branch reform going on elsewhere in the business can only make the task harder. But that is what Northern Ireland Water Service plans to do. In fact, the organisation's rollout of a mobile work management solution is a vital part of Water Reform, the project to transform it from a civil service department into an independent, self-financing, regulated, government-owned company (GoCo). Its mission is to deliver comparable service standards to its English and Welsh counterparts and to catch up on decades of under-investment. Water Service opted to outsource the delivery of its mobile work management solution to IT consortium Crystal Alliance. Crystal will also provide the new GoCo with billing and contact management services. Under the terms of the contract, awarded in January, Crystal leader Xansa will manage the overall implementation and provide back office billing processes. Partner Echo Managed Services will be responsible for customer billing and debt collection and for managing a new customer contact centre, while final partner AMT-Sybex will provide the mobile work management solution.Ian Staines, marketing development director in Xansa's utility department, explains the crucial role the deal will play in Water Reform. "The whole point of reform is to enable Water Service to be self-financing, because of its huge investment needs," he says, adding customers will be reluctant to pay for their water if the standard of service they receive is poor. Explaining why field force enablement is bundled into the contract together with billing and customer contact management, Staines says: "You can't provide good customer service without enabling the field force to do what they need to do." Phil Barker, operations director at Water Service, says outsourcing was the best bet for his organisation because it simply did not have all the capability in-house to deliver market-leading solutions, while competition through tender also drove value into the deal. According to Barker, the benefits to be derived from kitting out Water Service's workforce with up-to-date mobile systems are many. Customer service will improve if engineers can get to problems quicker and with the right tools for the job. For the company, there will be efficiency and productivity gains. Significantly fewer work schedulers will be needed. The target is to reduce the headcount by 180 over three years, which is 10 per cent of those currently employed to do the job. The reductions will be achieved through a combination of retirement and voluntary redundancy. Customer contact will also be rationalised: the four contact centres currently handling calls will be consolidated into one centre in Belfast under Crystal. Existing "over-the-counter" contact points will also be reduced. In the longer run, the new tools will enable Water Service to understand its assets better, as details are recorded on site. Barker hopes the current "legacy issues with asset data" will be vastly improved by 2009, when the company will undergo its third asset management period review, which will set capital spending for 2010-15.At present, Water Service uses a variety of standalone customer service and works management systems, including one for scheduling maintenance, a geographic information system that holds details of underground assets and a bespoke system for scheduling the emptying of private septic tanks. Work scheduling for engineers is paper based. The new tools will be phased in gradually. Phase 1, scheduled for October this year, will see call handling transferred to Crystal and some of the new work planning modes implemented. Malachy Martin, head of mobile field work at AMT-Sybex, says: "It is planned to migrate the data from the existing scheduling system to Ellipse [AMT-Sybex's enterprise asset management suite], which will then become the core work management repository." At this stage, Ellipse will generate paper work orders, to provide some consistency during the system changeover. In phase 2a (March/April 2007), 20-40 mobile devices will be piloted among staff "to test their response and understand their views," Barker explains. He is determined to give his teams on the front line an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the technology to give the project the best chance of success. The pilot will also allow any necessary adjustments to be made in time for phase 2b in October/November 2007 when the full rollout of 600 devices will proceed. Martin says jobs will then be sent directly to each worker, and workers will be able to create and report asset information in the field. Contact centre agents will also be kept up to date on progress with each job via an interface between Ellipse and Echo's RapidXtra web-enabled billing and contact centre management software. The aim is to provide agents with a single view of every customer history as well as work in progress and the availability of field force operatives to respond to complaints. They will be better informed and able to deliver a better service. By the middle of 2008, phase 3 will see fully automated scheduling of both reactive jobs created in the customer contact centre and routine maintenance and inspection jobs generated by the asset management system. It is no secret that the entire Water Reform package has met with widespread hostility across Northern Ireland. Unions threatened strike action over job cuts when the proposals were first announced, customers were up in arms about the prospect of paying for water (there have never hitherto been specific water bills), and others opposed the GoCo proposals on the basis that it was privatisation by the back door. So what has the workforce made of the field force enablement proposals? Barker says it is still very early days. "We are still designing the processes and hence are not into the negotiation phase yet," he says. "Any changes to terms and conditions are some way off." He acknowledges that the unions are fundamentally opposed to Water Reform, but says they have been in a dialogue with Water Service about the mobility proposals since January. "We are all still round the table, which is encouraging," he says. Presentations are being prepared for operations staff, explaining what Water Service is trying to achieve and why. Barker has faith in his team: "We have a very dedicated workforce who do their best to deliver good customer service, in their minds perhaps despite the company not because of it." He hopes that when they see Water Service catching up with the mainland water companies, and that mobile work solutions have become "the norm" elsewhere, they will come around. He sees the changes as a balancing act between the needs of employees, customers and the company. The Water Reform aside, there is a lot to do on the field force enablement front alone. It is a huge cultural change to move from being a traditional mobile field force collecting a list of jobs in the morning from a depot to one using a fully automated mobile works scheduling system. And Water Service's demands are high. Martin says: "The big opportunity for Northern Ireland is that it will learn from other companies' experiences and quite rightly it wants its solution to be better than the existing best," says Martin. "[Water Service] is benefiting from our long experience of field force enablement. The technology is proven and what would have been a wish list five years ago is now in use by other companies." Is this too much too soon? Barker admits "there is a danger there" - and he says it is one the board is very aware of. "Saying we are going from zero to hero would do a disservice to what Water Service does now, but we are trying to move up the evolutionary curve as far as we can in one jump." However, both he and Martin agree that the fact that the technology is proven is crucial in cutting down the risk. Martin says: "This technology has all been proven - South West Water, for example, has Ellipse and RapidXtra and the two talk to each other [Water Service] can see that all this has been done before and it works." Barker concurs: "We are not using cutting-edge technology. These are proven systems. The risk is all around successful implementation." On this front, he is, sensibly, keen to get as much support as possible. "I would welcome assistance from any company across the pond who could help us here," he says. Project management and change management skills are particularly welcome. n<BR>
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information - UK. All Rights Reserved.
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