Burbank Water & Power Streamlines Field Operations with a Crew-Friendly Work Management Solution
Burbank Water and Power (BWP) is a community-owned utility that provides reliable, affordable, and sustainable water and electric services to more than 50,000 residential and business customers in the City of Burbank, California.
BWP wanted a solution that would automate the hundreds of work activities performed each day in the field. SSP Lifecycle provided the automation BWP needed, culminating in thousands of labor savings per year.
SSP Lifecycle is a crew-friendly workforce management system that facilitates operational work and projects across the entire utility. It gives field crews a simple, single-screen dashboard with everything they need to perform and close work. Relevant information from GIS, EAM, ERP, and other systems are fed directly to workers in an intuitive, actionable format they can readily use. Updates are automatically synchronized back to relevant enterprise systems as work is performed.
The Challenge
Paper Forms & Process Bottlenecks
BWP’s operations were getting bogged down by manual processes. Their former processes involved crews filling out paper forms in the field which then were routed back to the office where information had to be entered into BWP’s CIS system.
Office staff also needed to manually update BWP’s WAM and GIS systems with the hundreds of work requests being completed daily. This manual process created a bottleneck in managing field work, creating delays and inefficiencies in carrying out tasks such as GIS Updates, meter reads, customer trouble calls, and new customer installations.
“These delays affected many of our systems,” said Bill Wickersheim, Manager of Technology at Burbank Water and Power. “It would take months for the information to get to our GIS team for entry. This affected our transformer analytics software and planning projects. It also had a major effect on our outage management system not having an accurate view of our network.”
The Solution
SSP Lifecycle Manages Work & Keeps Systems in Sync at BWP
To tackle this bottleneck, BWP put SSP Lifecycle in place to automate work-related field processes. With out-of-the-box functionality for dashboards, workflow management, and configurations, SSP Lifecycle enabled BWP staff to directly manage field work requests. These tools, along with integrations with BWP’s GIS, WAM, and CIS systems, streamlined their workflow and eliminated the redundancy of entering the same information in multiple systems, while preserving data accuracy.
SSP Lifecycle serves as a single location to access and manage the status and details about work – without jumping between multiple systems. This enables users to quickly find the field work requests and information relevant to them and pass work items to the stakeholders responsible for managing the next step in each business process.
SSP Innovations’ implementation team configured SSP Lifecycle to accommodate BWP’s workflows, limiting inputs to the essential information users must provide to complete their steps in the business process. Field workers enter information directly into SSP Lifecycle, which then automatically updates external systems at BWP. What previously required an hour of work to manually input paper forms and notes from field employees into external systems now takes only a few minutes in SSP Lifecycle.
As a versatile application that’s accessible from any device, SSP Lifecycle provides BWP with a single solution to manage all field work. Operations staff now have a single source for accurate information about the work they need to complete, without needing to understand or interact with multiple systems.