People — especially a sizable field service workforce — are arguably one of the most important assets a company can have. Ensuring a field service workforce can perform its tasks easily and in the most efficient way supports a company’s productivity and cost abatement goals. Augmenting the field service workforce will continue to be a top priority for utility companies around the world, especially as they struggle with shrinking technical workforces and difficulties in recruiting digital talent and skills. According to IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Utilities 2022 Predictions (#US47075621, October 2021), “by 2025, 50% of utilities will have upgraded their field services application and deployed emerging technologies such as wearables and augmented reality, improving first-time fix rates by 50%.”
In 2017, Ameren Corp., an American power and energy holding company servicing 2.4 million electric customers and more than 900,000 natural gas customers across Missouri and Illinois, decided to make workforce transformation a cornerstone of its digital transformation efforts. According to Balaji Govindhan, Ameren’s director of digital workforce management, the goal was “to optimize field service workers’ productivity by providing them with the right information, at the right time, wherever they are.”
The field service workforce transformation project was designed with multiple phases so the company could dynamically apply lessons learned along the way. Specifically, the endeavor was broken down into three macro areas: gas compliance, electricity transmission (covering substations and relays), and electricity and gas distribution (covering meters). The final phase of the project is due for completion in June 2022.
At the core of this transformation was the implementation of Salesforce’s cloud-based Field Service solution. By leveraging Salesforce Field Service, Ameren would eliminate the need for its field service workers to go to disparate systems to complete tasks, enabling them to get all the information they required from a single system on their mobile device.
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