Company: Louisville Water Industry: Energy & Utilities
Headquarters: Louisville, KY Website:www.louisvillewater.com
Cloud-Native Platform Offers Single Face of Work for all Field and Asset Management Functions for 160-Year-Old Utility Company
Sunnyvale, CA, Dec. 9, 2020 – KloudGin, the leading provider of AI cloud-based field service and asset management solutions, has completed a project to manage linear and plant-based assets and connect its workforce, customers and community for Kentucky’s largest public water provider, Louisville Water Company. KloudGin’s work management platform is providing Louisville Water with increased worker and operational efficiency, automated processes, visibility into asset management and superior customer service.
Louisville Water embarked on a multi-phased, digital transformation project to streamline operations and boost efficiencies using KloudGin’s combined field service and asset management solution. The KloudGin solution replaced systems that were 30 years old, mostly paper driven and required multiple manual operations. Additionally, there was no mobile capacity for employees to communicate and record their work while in the field.
“Digital transformation is helping us maximize our scheduling, asset reliability and uptime, reduce capital and operational expenditures, extend asset life, reduce unplanned downtime and provide superior customer service – all without increasing operational, safety or environmental risks,” said Dave Vogel, Executive Vice President, Louisville Water Company. “KloudGin has a deep understanding of how to effectively deploy mobile field asset management for seamless adoption and their team has extensive experience servicing the utility industry. We have a billion dollars’ worth of assets to manage and KloudGin has allowed us to make informed decisions, so we are able to evaluate and extend the useful life of our assets.”
“Our mission with this project was ‘doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time,’ along with a goal of achieving operational efficiency,” said James Bates, Director of Infrastructure Planning and Records, Louisville Water Company. “It’s not just about capturing work efficiencies but examining how we spend resources and replace assets that are at the end of their life cycle. KloudGin & WAM are providing us with crucial data, which has led us to greater operational efficiency and effectiveness.”
“Delivering visibility into field assets, workflow and demand is helping Louisville Water lower costs, and raise productivity — critical factors for today’s competitive market,” said Vikram Takru, CEO of KloudGin. “Louisville Water has been able to achieve maximum value by empowering their mobile workforce and optimizing the customer experience. Louisville Water is transforming its business by connecting customers with employees and the information they need to make informed decisions.”
Using KloudGin’s Platform, Louisville Water is now able to:
- Manage all work on the same platform with a single mobile interface for all field resources;
- Eliminate paper trails and optimize labor and inventory;
- Schedule employees and work orders more effectively, with progress tracking for future benchmarking;
- Automate timekeeping and approval process;
- Prioritize work orders by both system criticality and work order criticality;
- Allow field crews to update work activity with exact location of repairs via Esri GIS integration and;
- Implement a Single Sign-On (SSO) that allows crews to use existing network usernames and passwords – making their jobs easier.
With the seamless deployment and positive user adoption of KloudGin, Louisville Water replaced Oracle Mobile Workforce Management for CC&B-related work orders. This involved implementation of the CC&B integration adapter along with configuration and testing, which was accomplished in three months. KloudGin field service management is now used by all of Louisville Water’s customer-facing field service representatives.
About the KloudGin Installation
Louisville Water began their digital transformation with Phase 1 by deploying the KloudGin work management platform in the treatment facilities that had poor cellular service. KloudGin created and scheduled work orders and the KloudGin mobile app filled the void for the field workers who were in disconnected mode.
In Phase 2, Louisville Water needed to expand from plant and facilities maintenance to distributed asset maintenance. WAM began creating preventive and corrective maintenance on their distributed assets with KloudGin enabling the mobile work execution and automated scheduling. During Phase 2, Louisville Water also replaced their existing customer service workforce management tool with KloudGin and expanded the project to include Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) work. This allowed Louisville Water to leverage KloudGin to schedule all Asset and Customer Service work in one scalable engine across the enterprise. The implementation team was led by Louisville Water’s business systems support team, Ernst & Young and TMG Consulting with support from KloudGin.
For GIS integration, KloudGin deployed Web Services for maps through the KloudGin mobile app and built it into the workflows and processes. Using the app, crews can view work orders, reference the GIS map to update work activities, and include the exact location of repairs.
With the KloudGin mobile app, the team designed a workflow for Louisville Water’s Valve Trace process. This provides the ability for a crew to drop a pin on a map to select a water main that is indicating a leak. KloudGin then runs a trace to identify which valves in the system need to be shut off to isolate the leak. The trace also provides a list of customers and fire hydrants that are impacted, allowing them to proactively alert customers and fire departments of service outages and provide repair updates.
About Louisville Water Company
Louisville Water Company began operations in October 1860 as Kentucky’s first public water utility and today delivers an average of 120 million gallons of drinking water to nearly one million people in Louisville Metro and surrounding counties. Louisville Water is the only utility to trademark tap water, Louisville pure tap® and its treatment plants are ranked as two of the top 18 in North America for outstanding water quality.
About KloudGin
KloudGin, Inc. is the only combined one-cloud industry-focused field service and asset management solution that automates work management processes, enables customer self-service, and increases worker productivity. KloudGin’s solutions unlock new revenue streams and business models for operations with complex mobile workforce, asset management and field service requirements. KloudGin connects customers, employees, sub-contractors, and assets with AI-powered access to information on any device. Visit www.kloudgin.com.