SUCCESS STORY

Louisville Water

COMPANY:
Louisville Water

INDUSTRY:
Energy & Utilities

HEADQUARTERS:
Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville Water Company provides safe, high-quality drinking water to nearly one million people every day. They have a 159-year history of quality, innovation, value and service. The company began operations in 1860 as Kentucky’s first public water provider and today supplies water and fire protection to communities in Louisville Metro and parts of Bullitt, Hardin, Nelson, Oldham, Shelby and Spencer counties.

The Challenge

Louisville Water has a strong sense of pride in their company heritage, brand, and technology. They wanted to embrace these values while transforming their operations to be the utility for the next generation. They saw a digital transformation project as the nexus to provide insights into all connected things for the organization – assets, work and customers.

Digital transformation presented challenges for Louisville Water. Current systems were over 30 years old and mostly paper driven, inflexible, and manual with too many handoffs. There was no mobile integration for field workers to communicate and record their work. Data was stale and did not adequately represent the activities taking place in field operations. Finally, there was limited support and no opportunities to get enhancements to the current systems.

With consumers and employees demanding more services while pressure was high to drive lower rates, Louisville Water decided the time was right to embark on what would become a multi-phased digital transformation project to streamline operations and boost efficiencies. Their driving mission was “Doing the right thing – in the right place – at the right time.”

Louisville Water selected WAM for enterprise asset management and began Phase 1 of the project which involved Plant and Facilities work. From a field operations standpoint, they were receiving work tickets from a homegrown legacy application that generated tickets but had no way to tie any of the work back to the assets that were being serviced. The work tickets were distributed with Oracle Workforce Management (WM), and they were using a separate GIS platform which was unable to share files back and forth with WM.

For the project to move forward, Louisville Water needed to be able to track the work performed on different assets – what work was performed, why they were doing the work, and why the assets were failing. They began looking for a new solution for work management to replace Oracle WM.

The Solution

Following an extensive bid process, the cross-functional MG&E selection committee selected the KloudGin FSM platform as the new Mobile Workforce Management tool. KloudGin provides an industry-centric approach through its Machine Learning-based field service management cloud platform, which enables MG&E to quickly schedule, route-optimize, dispatch and deliver short-cycle work, and set the stage for a planned project to do the same with long-cycle work. Access to real-time information provides a more predictable and cost-effective view of the customer interactions, service interruptions, and actual crew costs.

KloudGin worked together with its technology partners Ernst & Young, Oracle and Esri GIS to accomplish this implementation. KloudGin’s strong partnerships, coupled with its internal utilities expertise, were instrumental in executing this successful deployment of mission-critical technology at MG&E. KloudGin’s tight integration with Esri’s GIS mapping system allowed the solution to provide real-time map access across mobile devices, thus minimizing the need for paper maps or separate GIS apps.MG&E went ahead and put mobile devices in the hands of all the field crews, whether it was for customer service work, outage tickets, or meter services.

Results

Improved Data Collection

KloudGin’s mobile-centric platform replaced a variety of paper and manual processes, custom application and single-point systems with one mobile-friendly platform. KloudGin also adapted their platform to meet MG&E’s existing compliance and security requirements. Previously, crews and staff had to work primarily from printed orders, with data provided from multiple systems and formats. KloudGin has standardized these workflows onto a single platform that automates many repetitive tasks, normalizes information across all device types, and speeds field work execution and central information gathering and analysis efforts. KloudGin replaced existing systems which didn’t allow efficient collection and real-time analysis of data in the field. Crews now have digital access to GIS data, service points and work history and more at their fingertips, through the KloudGin Mobile application. This real-time data allows MG&E to better monitor impacts to customers and provide notifications to improve service.

Automated Time Clocking
MGE has complex Timekeeping requirements which include tracking of Time against Work Orders, Administration Tasks, and other activities. KloudGin also enables the ability to allow Crew Members to use accurate “Pay Codes” to support more efficient payroll processing. KloudGin has been able to successfully implement these processes within the existing Time Card Generation Logic. In addition, Crew Members are able to edit their records, copy them over to additional team members. This results in a more efficient and timely process for crew members and staff who support the process.

Integrations
KloudGin platform’s integration engine and adaptors, enabled MGE to rapidly integrate and configure workflows with core utility systems of record,

Oracle C2M (Customer 2 Meter Billing)
Oracle C2M (Customer 2 Meter Billing
Kronos
Esri ArcGIS
Single Sign On (SSO)

High-Capacity Scheduling

KloudGin’s automated scheduling engine can schedule and route optimize “All Work”. KloudGin scheduler is high capacity, AI based and is continuous, offering full, and rapid plans throughout the day that take account of real time changing conditions on the ground including emergencies, increased travel time due to traffic conditions, crew overtimes, resource time offs and the like. KloudGin partnered with MGE to develop a ‘notify closest’ mode of scheduling for emergency work. KloudGin mobile is real-time location aware and crew location is tracked via the tablet’s location services. When an emergency comes in, the crews closest to the emergency work location are notified by the KloudGin workflow orchestration engine, with the ability to use email, sms and push notifications. Crew responses are monitored to the second and acceptances and rejections are tracked. Further, if a crew does not respond within a specified time, the system contacts the next closest crew for assignment.

KloudGin / Esri Integration Drives Efficiency
The combined solution of KloudGin and Esri ArcGIS delivered an integrated solution to MGE. The ability to access GIS information drives efficiency by having asset information available in the same place as the mobile work application. New operational benefits included:

GIS views built into service workflows to provide crews with valuable data throughout the process
Work Orders plotted on the GIS Map which allow dispatchers to schedule using the Lasso Functionality.
It is done via ArcGIS Identity Authentication (OAuth 2.0 protocol) to highlight ESRI technology consumed within KG.
As an Electric and Gas Utility, MGE requires the best Security protocols to be adhered to for access to the MGE GIS Network. KloudGin has successfully integrated with the MGE GIS Network and enabled GIS Maps within the Mobile and Web Applications without compromising on IT Security protocols.

“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. 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.”

- Dave Vogel

Executive Vice President Louisville Water Company

SOLUTION SUMMARY