Mobile Technologies Improve Utility Preventative Maintenance
Utilities hold a sacred public trust. Whether it’s electric power generation and transmission, natural gas distribution, or water/wastewater, people depend on public, private, and investor-owned utilities to deliver reliable services every day without interruption. When those services fail, customers naturally feel that trust has been violated. Utilities can’t totally prevent downtime caused by natural or weather events like an earthquake, hurricanes, or freezes. However, they can improve equipment reliability to lessen outages resulting from failures or breakdowns using preventative maintenance techniques. Mobile technologies offer a way for utilities to bolster their preventative maintenance programs. Let’s examine how.
Digital Transformation’s Role in Utility Preventative Maintenance
Digital transformation is a new and different way to look at the relationship between utilities and customers, between frontline workers and their colleagues and managers, and how work is accomplished. As its name implies, digital transformation harnesses the power of digital technology to accomplish things in new and more efficient ways. Mobile solutions are one important component of any digital transformation.
Mobile solutions enable frontline workers, such as maintenance technicians and equipment operators, to use and disseminate operational data more effectively than could be done before. Thanks to a mobile solution, critical equipment information can be collected, shared, and acted upon with lightning speed. Such speed empowers utilities to move beyond run-to-fail maintenance practices to more effective preventative maintenance techniques. This means equipment problems can be diagnosed and repaired before it fails, reducing outages and preserving service.
How Mobile Solutions Aid Utility Preventative Maintenance
For utility companies, enterprise mobility offers the best place to make an immediate and measurable impact. These devices include smartphones, tablets, mobile printers, barcode readers, RFID readers, wearables, drones, and more, all connected via a “mobile-first” platform tied into the company’s back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) system such as SAP or IBM Maximo. Enterprise mobility positively benefits an organization’s operations across a variety of areas, such as asset management, production, maintenance, logistics, warehouse management, inventory, and so on.
But specifically, mobile technology can transform utility preventative maintenance in the following ways:
Personnel efficiency: Utility workers require mobile devices to operate more efficiently in the field and to resist these hostile situations. Technologies like GIS mapping and potent picture processing tools can provide information without endangering their safety. And resistant mobile devices can assist utility workers to use predictive technology in their workflow to identify emerging hazards and lower the frequency and severity of accidents through software support. Maintenance teams can efficiently work together to quickly resolve challenging or risky work circumstances and efficiently detect, manage, and fix the underlying causes of operational issues with the use of mobile solutions.
They can physically scan job sites and record observations while conducting inspection reports, improve job site reporting and more efficiently assess customer claims for site-related damage.
We now have personal cell phones, tablets, and wearable devices that are the foundation of the new mobile workforce technology. This technology can interact with various systems and make use of specialized linked devices to support tasks like planning and dispatch, failure reporting, invoicing, mapping, and asset management.
Improved collaboration and communication: Field workers can receive vital information at their fingertips, remotely log operations, and offer updates on the condition of power lines and other infrastructure in real-time owing to networking, through the 4G, 5G, or CBRS spectrum. The increased emphasis on real-time engagement and providing customers with visibility into utility operations puts pressure on businesses to limit downtime and be accessible online. With mobile technologies, workers and technicians can respond quickly to shutdowns. And, to prevent tragedies, utilities can even plan for peak demand brought on by harsh weather with the aid of field service software.
This data can also be logged on a mobile device, shared between teams, and uploaded to the main database. Technology use can result in shorter back-office production times and higher profit margins. Additionally, near real-time information visibility made possible by mobile technology helps speed up decision-making and reduce equipment turnaround times.
Looking for Additional Information?
Visit innovapptive.com to learn more about leveraging mobile technologies for transforming utility maintenance.