COLUMBUS, Ohio – ARCOS has implemented its Crew Manager solution for Eversource Energy to increase completion rates for planned work. The resource management solution enables centralized crew planning that employees across the service territory can run during blue-sky days and major events. With centralized data about crews and resources, Eversource is able to operate more efficiently across 40 work centers in three states.
“Crew Manager gives Eversource a look at how much work gets done daily and whether there’s consistency in how crews approach work,” said Bill Brackett, vice president of Services and Support at ARCOS.
Crew Manager, an automated crew management solution, increases work schedule maximization rates. In a work center with 25 employees working a 40-hour week, there will be a maximum of 1,000 hours of work for planning purposes. Eversource planners input desired staff hours into the plan for each work center. Using the Crew Manager SaaS solution to schedule work and the make-up of crews, the utility’s adherence rates for planned work have climbed more than 10 percent company-wide.
To boost productivity, Eversource wanted every supervisor to know how his or her peers organized and dispatched crews. In the past, one work center might assign a three-person crew to a particular kind of job that another work center handled with two lineworkers. By displaying this information in Crew Manager for all crews and managers to see, supervisors can now collaborate on how to “right-size” crews for the job.
“We are constantly striving to operate more efficiently, so when trouble arises, customers see fewer and shorter outages,” said Steve Gilkey, vice president of Electric Field Operations for Eversource Energy in Connecticut. “We have had our share of storms over the past few years here in New England. Using Crew Manager has helped ensure that crews across our service territory can travel and assist those in other states using one consistent tool that maximizes productivity.”
Every crew member across Eversource’s system can now walk into a work center and see the same 80-inch smartboard broadcasting Crew Manager, which shows their truck, crew and work tasks for the day.
Crew Manager also shows Eversource the kind of trucks its crews use on certain jobs and if they are accomplishing jobs with, say, smaller vehicles. The information helps the company decide if some equipment on the property isn’t necessary, which can lead to retiring assets. In the wake of major outages, Crew Manager provides a look back at specific days, hours or minutes to see the location of crews and what they worked on. For any storm, managers can precisely determine how many crews were on the system, which increases confidence when presenting storm cost recovery information.
About ARCOS LLC
ARCOS provides innovative workforce management solutions that help utilities and other critical infrastructure industries manage people, work, and assets in a single platform. ARCOS enables utilities to quickly mobilize personnel for blue and grey sky work, manage native and non-native crews in a single system, and accelerate operations with field mobility tools that deliver real-time situational awareness. More than 250 utilities rely on ARCOS to advance safety, reduce field costs, and improve response times and customer satisfaction.
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