In the utility industry, developments in mobile technology have created large returns on investment through the delivery of zero-latency connectivity between the field and the back office. This has driven tangible returns in a wide variety of critical functions like outage response, safety and quality of service, the number of work orders completed each day, asset management, and the accuracy and timeliness of field operations. Spanning the front line of effective customer service, these applications embrace field user groups including service, dispatching, construction, operations, maintenance, engineering and delivery, all of whom require rapid access to large amounts of dynamic, up-to-date information from a variety of enterprise computing systems. Dynamic downloads and uploads of all the customer, facility network, asset, and materials information can be efficiently completed for an unlimited variety of complex field operations.

Utility Companies Storyboard

Let’s imagine that Bill and Joe who are some of the many Utility Company (e.g ENEL) employees who are normally deployed in field for emergency intervention on spot are travelling with their van returning to the office after some remote site intervention; in the meanwhile somewhere else and far away from were they are travelling in some plant there is an emergency on the Utility’s network or equipment. With the network infrastructure and applications and by the use of some very sophisticated portable devices they receive all the needed information on how to locate and most likely how to tackle and solve the problem they are going to find in the faulty remote location they are on the way of reaching; moreover in case need arises they can also receive useful information on how to reach the remote site with maps and detailed routing with the aid of some location based service system.

After a while, Bill and Joe reached the faulty site in need of emergency intervention but even with all the received information and documentation (data sheets, manuals and schematics from the company repository, for example) the problem is worse than expected beforehand and they most likely will need the support of some expert in the field of the problem at hand - they will surely need some face-to-face or anything pretty close to solve the problems in due time; then at this point they can reach the expert with a video call using the integrated 3G terminal and network. They could even show live some details of the equipment and the fault in hand by the use of the integrated video camera - and in addition they could also send schematics or other details needed in order to solve the fault. After some use of those equipment and in due time, perhaps with the aid of a remote expert, Bill and Joe have successfully solved the problem, have added all the relevant information to the Utility Company data-base, have completed and sent back a complete report with some multimedia details and are travelling back to the main office waiting for a new mission on field.