Blog

When it comes to daily planning during blue-sky operations, the tricky part is not laying out the workday, knowing what to do, or launching projects ahead of time. Instead, the challenge lies within the inevitable pop-up of unplanned events – you know, when Jim has to call off due to an emergency, or Sarah has a last-minute doctor appointment. 

With a schedule that’s already full of inspections, maintenance, and infrastructure repair jobs, managing both people and work for regular daily operations and spontaneous situations can quickly become a time-consuming, restoration-delaying, never-seem-to-make-any-headway mess.

To better cover your bases and accommodate last-minute changes, companies need to have a scalable system in place that eliminates the build-up of manual processes surrounding unplanned events big or small. It’s an essential measure preventing crew changes from flowing backward thanks to unexpected assignments. And ultimately, the forward momentum created by efficiently maximized finite resources will better ramp-up and tackle the amount of infinite work. 

When all real-time cards are visible on the table (work orders, available crews, and more), it’s a cinch to make quick, informed decisions that both save time and improve customer service. Automating processes such as callout, crew management, roster exchanges, and work tickets lead to a faster response due to the right people completing the jobs that their skills speak to the most. This resource alignment allows crews to move on to the next queued up order more swiftly. 

ARCOS’ solutions are perfect for the process. Products like Mobile Workbench can:

• Report on the location, status of equipment, and crew makeup via mobile technology 
• Integrate with ARCOS Callout, Crew Manager, and Mobile Workbench to change your business with an increase in operational efficiency
• Help make reporting and reimbursement a snap by capturing data from one source of truth
• Provide valuable insight into the past with historical data capture, so tomorrow’s plans can draw from a basis of exact and accurate real-world knowledge

Municipals and cooperatives alike can benefit immensely from having a flexible work management solution. Mobile Workbench compresses the amount of time it takes to assign, distribute, and manage work conducted in the field. 

There is a smarter, better way to make your business more efficient. Learn more about how to automate your day-to-day blue sky operations and emergency needs with ARCOS Mobile Workbench. Click here.

The holidays. Summertime. Spring break. What do all of these things have in common? Oh yeah, busy travel times! In fact, holiday travel records were broken at the end of 2019, with 115.6 million Americans traveling between December 21st and January 1st, 2020, according to AAA.

The same article mentions that amidst the hustle and bustle of the season, air travel saw a 4.9% growth, with over 6 million Americans expected to fly around the holidays. That’s the most the industry has seen since 2003. (AAA Newsroom)

Each new year brings new rankings and lists, with everything from “2019’s Best Films and TV Shows” to “The Best and Worst U.S. Airlines of 2019” – a yearly piece with The Wall Street Journal. This year, ARCOS is proud that many of our airline industry partners landed top spots on the list.

According to the article:

 “Airlines say 2019 had stronger everyday storms and more congestion on air-traffic routes and big airports than 2019. They expect things to get even worse this year.” 

How is your airline keeping up? Top-ranked airlines on the scorecard face unpredictable storms and increasing amounts of travelers by automating their ground shift management and filling trips with solutions like ARCOS RosterApps and Ascend – helping airlines to get planes into the air more efficiently.

Despite all of the challenges, from weather to more travelers taking to the skies, ARCOS partners have even seen improvement with KPIs like:

• On-time arrival rates
• Number of cancellations
• Number of delayed flights
• Number of late or lost bags, and more

This can be accomplished by engaging your employees, administrators, and schedulers with tech that gives full visibility into open shifts and trips, all while automatically applying your company’s rules and policies. And yes, that means eliminating the manual processes that often lead to human errors and grievances.

Want to learn more? Check out our airline solutions, or download our whitepaper on how ARCOS RosterApps increases the efficiency of airline ground support.

Many large corporations have started to realize the complexity required to maintain shift management swapping, trading and bidding processes. If you have a shift-based workforce with specialized skills and strict business rules or union agreements, shift management inefficiencies can be costing you big time.

If you’re struggling with filling unplanned gaps in shifts, finding people to meet overtime needs, or keeping your employees happy with their schedules, technology exists to help. Specifically, new shift management solutions can address filling shifts but also shift bidding and even shift trading processes.

What’s the Problem?

Far too many companies are still attempting to handle this process with Excel spreadsheets, phone calls, paper requests and whiteboards. This process becomes even more daunting when you’re also dealing with filling last minute gaps in the schedule. Recently, we took a poll of several critical infrastructure companies. Nearly 80% fill their shifts manually with phone calls.  Additionally, 40% of those companies report that they lose valuable time trying to get the correct skilled employees into the correct shifts. When you look at the overall picture here, it’s a recipe for inefficiency that can cost you big time.

What Can You Do?

It is time to digitize and automate the shift management process.

Automation will… 

• Ensure business rules, union contracts, and company policies are followed without error in a consistent and fair approach 
• Cut administration costs and enable employee self-service; greatly improve employee morale, which can reduce turnover
• Dramatically reduce errors in payroll associated with overtime and shift swapping
• Free up managers and supervisors so they can focus on leading their employees, not handling administrative tasks

ARCOS has the leading solutions for critical infrastructure companies trying to manage their workforce and increase productivity of managers and supervisors. Too good to be true? Don’t just take our word for it, check out how we helped our customer Piedmont Airlines streamline their shift management processes. 

Consider this – everyday, digital transformation is happening all around us. Technology puts our world in a constant state of change and forces critical infrastructure industries to quickly automate another manual process in their operations.  Gallup Research shows that in the working world, millennials are quickly outnumbering generation x-ers and baby boomers. Within the next two years, 50 percent of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of millennials. Companies face the challenge of attracting and developing this powerful contingent that has different priorities and values than previous generations. In industries where skilled employees are retiring in droves every year, technology is the key to engaging new generations of employees.

How Businesses Are Responding

Almost half of millennials say they have the newest and greatest technology items, while Boomers come in at one quarter, half the size of the millennial bloc. Engaging your workforce via technology is one of the best ways to attract new employees and ensure your workers feel connected to the work being done – not to mention provide flexibility around their work/life balance. Today’s workforce is looking for both stability and flexibility. They want to work, but they want to work shifts on their terms. Critical infrastructure industries will need to be able to provide this flexibility in order to attract a vibrant workforce – and do so in a manner that is efficient, safe and cost effective.

As this landscape of workers continues to change, digital and mobile technologies will be at the cutting edge of employee engagement. 42% of Millennials use real-time messaging at work, 42% use social media and 32% use work storage or sharing applications. The bottom line is, when you invest in technology – you invest in your employees. Just because a company has done something a certain way “forever,” doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.

The Role Technology Plays

Companies like ARCOS are helping critical infrastructure companies stay ahead of the curve of innovation by automating manual processes and providing mobility to field and plant technicians, as well as supervisors – all within regulations and business rules. ARCOS can help your organization take those tedious processes like paper note keeping, spreadsheets, whiteboards and manual phone calls. Digitizing shift management by automating the filling of shifts and managing complicated processes like shift bidding and swapping can help empower employees and give them guided autonomy and flexibility.

In a recent survey of critical infrastructure companies, we asked about the top challenges that these industries are facing. Here’s what they said: 

• 80% are being weighed down by manually handling processes that can be automated to save both time and money
• 40% are worried about the age demographics of their employees shifting
• 30% of companies are worried about falling behind technologically

Let us help you. Learn more about how ARCOS can help your bottom line while engaging your workforce with our shift management solutions. Don’t just take our word for it, read more to see how we helped Piedmont Airlines dramatically improve their key performance indicators significantly. Learn more from our Ground Crew Support Scheduling white paper. 

Each year, companies are being pressured to do more with less. There is an infinite amount of work to do, but always a finite amount of resources to use. Being able to pick up the slack from unproductive, painful, manual processes can be a game-changer when it comes to your bottom line. Luckily, you’re not on your own and ARCOS can help.

So, What’s The Problem?

In a recent survey, we asked companies in the critical infrastructure space to think about their processes and tell us where they’re losing the most productivity time. We asked them to rank processes on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most time-consuming. 

Our responders shared that they ranked creating schedules and following through on reporting as a 9.9 out of 10 difficulty. Whether it’s trying to get specialized employees into rigid shift structures according to your business or union rules, or spending time trying to figure out who the eligible employees are that can fill empty shifts, ARCOS works as your personal shift management assistant.

Another interesting response to our survey had to do with what tasks cause management to struggle at critical infrastructure companies, and honestly – we weren’t surprised by the result. 60% of the folks that took the survey listed managing work, reporting and productive time as their biggest struggle. 40% of those also lose valuable time getting the correct workers, with the correct skills, into the correct shifts, in the correct order. Automating this manual process could change the way managers and supervisors structure their day, leaving more time to focus on priorities and production.

How Can We Help?

With ARCOS, the manual, time-consuming processes described above can be a thing of the past. All the time spent with handwritten notes, spreadsheets, whiteboards, and manual phone calls and texts can be reduced and, in most cases, eliminated. With ARCOS shift management, you can complete processes that take several hours a day and shrink them down to mere minutes. The technology now exists that will enable you to spend more time on value added activities than emails and phone calls – here’s how Shift Management solutions from ARCOS  helped Duke Energy overhaul their plant operations and drastically help their day to day operations. 

The ARCOS Sunday Read focuses on the holiday that just passed – Thanksgiving. And while we as a business are thankful for the utility and critical infrastructure markets, we aren’t the only ones.

We totally agree with these op-ed pieces we found that express how thankful we should be for having reliable gas, water, and electric.

What you do to keep everything running is often overlooked. Thank you. We admire your hard work and dedication.

The Sunday Read shares JD. Power’s findings that business customer satisfaction with Electric Utilities climbed this year. ARCOS is proud of our customers and glad we could play a part in improving caidi/saidi scores. Our own, Jim Nowak, explains how in this Energy Central article.

The ARCOS Sunday Read is re-racking an important blog we ran a few weeks ago about keeping #compliant in the face of regulatory scrutiny. How can a business polish up their transparency? Read-on and find out!

How will utilities be impacted by distributed energy resources (DER)? The answer is, no one is sure yet, but with the growth of solar, wind, electric vehicles, energy storage devices and natural gas fueled generators, the output from DERs is helping address demand, replacing aging infrastructure and becoming the industry’s top area of investigation and support.

In Ontario, Canada, the IESO says over 4,000 megawatts of DERS were contracted or installed over the last 10 years. It has given customers a reduction in costs and addressed inadequate attention to regional load growth. According to Black & Veatch’s 2019 Strategic Directions: Smart Utilities Report Survey, a top industry poll of energy producers, DERs were sighted as the number one application to examine over the next 3 to 5 years. With a predicted energy drain thanks to increased EV acceptance and other factors, DERs are expected to aid and sometimes carry future power grids.

Analyzing the Analytics

Integrating this decentralized system of outside power producing entities into the fold is a task that needs to have a focus on the right analytics and interpretation of customer consumption data. Most utilities are doing due diligence by studying the growth of DERs now. If these alternative power options for generation can be optimized, how much can they feed into a system? Is it making a difference? Are they curbing peaks and leading to less outages? Are the most affected outage areas seeing a decline in restoration crews thanks to the power DERs are providing?

As outages happen and crews are sent to respond and restore, a tool such as the ARCOS software suite can report on when, where and exactly what happened. This data can then be unified with smart meters and other measuring instruments to gain clarity on exactly what DERs are doing for a utility’s service area. Matching up the historic record of response calls over time can easily show a decrease of outages in identified trouble areas and can verify if DER implementation is having a positive effect, needs routed a different way, or the energy provided increased.

DERs are only going to continue to grow. They will be a part of tomorrow’s energy landscape and a solution to some of today’s problems. Is your utility ready to effectively utilize distributed energy resources? How are you researching DERs impact on current grids and planning for future implementation? Contact ARCOS and let’s start a conversation.