Energy Corner: Better Work Order Management, Better Customer Communication

In today’s Energy Corner, we’ll look at how recent technology innovations can improve work order management, remote assistance, and customer communications — all from one simple, mobile application.

Field crew aren’t always sitting in their truck, staring at a laptop. We all know emails can get lost. If the goal is to deliver information to the right people at the right time, email doesn’t cut it. As we’ll see below, there’s a better way.

Beyond Email

These days, most employees live in collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack. This is especially true for mobile workers since these tools provide a one-stop shop for chat, file sharing, voice calls, and even screen sharing.

Although communication within these collaboration tools normally happens between live users, it’d be even better if crew management systems alerted the right field crew for the right events. With Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards technology, Microsoft Teams can connect the dots between system and person.

We created a concept for this in Figure 1. Imagine a dispatcher put a service order on hold inside SAP. Teams automatically generates the interactive card you see below, allowing crew leaders two options:

1. Choose from the list of available technicians in the Available Technicians drop-down list and then press the Reassign Order to assign the work order to them.
2. Press the Contact Customer button to call the customer to let them know that there’s a delay in the processing of their service request.

Figure 1: Working with Adaptive Cards in Microsoft Teams

The great thing about this adaptive card is that the two buttons are arbitrary! We could just as easily have enabled other actions. The form doesn’t have to just talk to SAP, either: expansion into other ERP, field service, and CIS systems is just as easy. The list of available technicians in the form above? It’s determined dynamically based on schedule board availability.

This kind of real-time collaboration is so much more powerful than email. Adaptive cards go to specific users or channels. In the latter case, you can think of the cards as a work queue where a group of users can pick up the alert and respond. When combined with workflow tools like Power Automate, sophisticated workflows take event processing to a whole new level.

Phone a Friend

Sometimes, field service technicians may get stuck working on a particular work order task. Whether the work instructions were vague or there’s just something special about the task in question, it’s nice to be able to phone a friend — especially when it’s possible to show that friend what’s wrong.

Although there are many (free) options to perform a live screenshare from a smart phone or tablet (e.g., Teams, FaceTime, etc.), Microsoft takes things a step further with their mixed reality Remote Assist solution. As you can see in Figure 2 below, Remote Assist allows lead technicians (e.g., a head linesperson, etc.) to guide their fellow technician through the problem by drawing on the screen, etc. This is sort of like having John Madden on the telestrator walking you through the solution step-by-step.

Figure 2: Real-Time Collaboration with Remote Assist

Voice and Text

It’s gotten a lot cheaper to send customers voice and text messages. For example, with Azure Communication Services, sending scripted phone or SMS text messages costs small fractions of a penny. Although this does require pro-code development, Azure provides great tools for developers to easily plug this functionality into your existing business systems.

These notifications are great customer service. Imagine sending your customer a text message with instructions to process a late payment. Within the message, a link to a chatbot guides them through the process — even after hours.

Closing Thoughts

Enterprise software systems require the user to come to them to find out information, and that adds to field crews’ frustrations. Often, an ERP or field service system “knows” that an event has taken place hours before key users find out about it. With modern collaboration solutions like adaptive cards or voice and SMS services, this should no longer be the status quo — systems should be delivering information into the hands of the right people at the right time so that there’s no delay in critical business processes.

As always, we welcome your feedback and would love to learn more about how such features might address common pain points that you’re currently wrestling with. If you’re interested in learning more about how this works, please contact us and we’d be happy to walk you through it.