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We know utilities face major challenges when it comes to the resource planning and acquisition process during major events. There are often not enough resources to go around, or logistics are managed manually without full visibility. And let’s face it – the extra time and inefficiency that come along with keeping track of your resource planning and logistics in a variety of places (which probably includes spreadsheets and handwritten notes) is just not worth it.

Along with the manual song and dance comes a significant risk of overlooking important details as you ramp-up for your event. Considering that 40% or more of the utility workforce is made up of contractors, we know how difficult it can be to respond to an event with crews. With all of this going on against a ticking clock, establishing one source of truth for your event needs becomes essential.

Take our current situation, for example. We are in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic, as storm season builds around us. Your operations may be functioning differently than normal as you work to promote social distancing and manage remote work. As you continue to get used to the “new normal”, an unexpected event may come along and turn your daily work on its head. Unfortunately, natural disasters and other major storms do not care about COVID-19, but we do.

Recently, ARCOS announced a new series of solutions for resource acquisition, planning, and sharing that integrate with the full ARCOS Resource Management platform, free to the utility industry. Now, you can manage resources and logistics surrounding events all in one place, giving visibility to supervisors, leadership, and stakeholders.

Automating your resource planning and acquisition means:

• Ditching the paper and time-consuming manual processes
• Giving your team, leadership, and third parties a bird’s eye view with one source of truth
• The ability to assemble and track crews, see gaps in scheduling, and manage lodging and other logistics all in one place
• Get a jump-start on planning before crew rosters arrive by utilizing “Stick Count” functionality, allowing users to create crews from Resource Planner into Crew Manager

Creating visibility into a real-time picture of the data saves a utility time and money when determining how many hotel rooms, meals and gallons of fuel are needed, compared to what the utility truly has on hand – ultimately impacting the estimated restoration time. Check out ARCOS Resource Planner to learn more and change how your utility handles resource planning, sharing, and acquisition. 

You’ve purchased new technology to become more efficient – now what? Afterall, your journey doesn’t just stop after implementation and launch. So, what exactly has to happen for a successful implementation, and what type of roll-out or user adoption strategies are best for your ROI?

Research has shown that without a well-organized and executed plan, many benefits of new technology (and the reason you hopped onboard in the first place) could fall flat. According to pmig.org:

• For every $1 billion invested in the United States in 2016, $97 million was wasted due to lacking project performance
• Only 64% of projects completed over the last 12 months successfully met the original goals and business intent of the project, and 14% were deemed failures
• 9.9% of every dollar is wasted due to poor project performance. The pace and scope of change underscore the need for excellence in project management

It’s obvious that strong workforce, work order, and project management is a necessity for coordinated, fast, and effective implementation projects. However, the adoption of new technology does demand thorough preparation to ensure a smooth transition with optimal adoption. The faster users adjust to the change, the quicker you can drive ROI and intended outcomes.​

ARCOS knows how essential a high-level rollout plan is – from recruiting and retaining a new generation as a part of your workforce, to bringing leadership and existing employees up to speed and keeping stakeholders in the loop. And we can help. 

The newly launched ARCOS Managed Services can assist critical infrastructure customers with speeding up the deployment and adoption of their ARCOS solution, ultimately spelling a faster ROI and assuring ongoing value for managers and workers.

The ARCOS Managed Services portfolio contains various offerings, like:

• The option to add a dedicated project manager to help customers simultaneously implement multiple ARCOS products
• ARCOS Experts who go beyond a traditional rollout by managing and implementing the project to ensure that your organization will see the most benefit
• Workshops and materials for change management adoption training and communication
• An assigned customer success manager to review and analyze your progress, and more!

Best practices and education surrounding products are always evolving. There are many big changes that come with adopting new technology, and ARCOS can help make things easier. Check out our latest Managed Services Webinar, on-demand, to learn more.

Doing more with less – we’ve all heard that old adage is the key to lean operations, but what does it mean? What does doing more with less look like in the real world? For operations, doing more with less means having information at your fingertips that will allow you to make quick, informed decisions about your staffing, output levels, resources, equipment and current priorities. This can range anywhere from payroll and shift coverage information, to manufacturing data or inventory numbers. Having visibility into all parts of your organization is paramount and can be the difference between lean, efficient operations and a complicated, tedious situation.

However, this information and your decisions don’t magically appear in the minds of your supervisors – you need automated systems in place to help you access information instantly and be able to make changes at a moment’s notice. The current pandemic has taught us that we can in fact maintain business continuity with adjusted shifts, remote work and unusual work groups – but it isn’t easy to manage all of the changes, especially if you have manual processes in place. By giving back some autonomy to employees regarding accepting work on new shifts, swapping regular shifts and submitting PTO or time off requests, you can avoid the countless hours of emails and phone calls for your HR groups and managers on duty. By automating shift coverage and management, you can instantly make calls to your entire workforce, in the right order according to your union or business rules, and fill shifts within minutes.This can also help if you need to get creative with your staffing or work groups, as these days many employees are looking for freedom and a semblance of control over their schedules, especially during these particularly trying times when we are reducing the chance of virus transmission

ARCOS can help you have that transparency and also make non-traditional shifts to cover all of your productive hours. With ARCOS, you can reduce some of the unnecessary costs that come with manual administrative work, quickly notify your employees of a company decision, and free up your supervisors to focus on important tasks and not time off requests, shift trades, or sick leave. You’ll have transparency with your employees and can also make non-traditional shifts to cover all of your productive hours, and increase the safety of your employees. Did we mention that it also automatically is compliant with your current business or union rules, eliminating those costly grievances that happen with improper staffing? Handing your schedules correctly alone could save your company tens of thousands of dollars in unneeded grievances, disputes and paperwork.

The reality is the benefits of automation to your bottom line can be significant. From reducing productivity or service disruptions due to inadequate staffing or resources, to keeping managers on task, ARCOS can help you utilize your workforce efficiently and effectively.

Storm season is rolling in, long-term projects are in motion, and your day-to-day work still has little surprises popping up along the way. While you continue to navigate these challenges, the COVID-19 Pandemic does not seem to care, but we do. Within just a few weeks, we saw the world change – and to stay ahead of the ever-evolving situation, utilities and other critical infrastructure industries had no choice but to adapt quickly. Through it all, ARCOS has listened and provided valuable assistance.

Some of our innovative customers, like Grant County Public Utility District, are implementing new pandemic response plans centered around the ARCOS Resource Management platform. There are creative ways to utilize your ARCOS solutions to help encourage social distancing – ultimately limiting exposure and putting your employees’ and customer’s safety first.

For example, a year after implementing ARCOS Callout and Scheduling, El Paso Electric Company was able to make timely changes in handling emergency callouts during the Pandemic. To minimize crew member interaction, many utility companies have switched to “pods.” El Paso used the ARCOS solution to initiate “pod” structures to keep daily crews together, so crew members who hadn’t come into contact with one another wouldn’t be placed together at night. ARCOS software created a system for assigning pre-determined groups to after-hours callouts, instead of building crews composed of first, available responders.

Here are a few simple ways the ARCOS Resource Management Platform can quickly help your organization during the COVID-19 Pandemic:

• Set up pod structures in Crew Manager. Keeping pods small and protected is a priority. Crew Manager can apply pod grouping rules to crews out in the field, limiting team exposure to other pods while promoting social distancing.
• Use ARCOS SIREN Messaging.  The ARCOS SIREN mass notification solution can help fill after-hours shifts on the weekends instead of using those who respond first to a callout. By ensuring that those working in a pod will continue to work only with each other, pod members will not come in contact with new crewmates.
• Keep track of logistics in Crew Manager.  Crew Manager can track logistics like lodging, meals, and amenities by showing you when and where everyone and everything is. Besides supporting traditional hotel-based accommodation, Crew Manager also helps manage alternative hospitality options, like tents and bunk trailers.
• Reduce cost and liability during disaster management with Incident Manager. While operating differently under the Pandemic, you may have to manage another significant event, such as a storm. Once restoration efforts for the second event are complete, you can close the incident in Incident Manager, and reports can be generated on the restoration while the Pandemic event remains open. This functionality provides a way to seamlessly track what’s happening at the big picture level, all the way down to what crews are working on for multiple events at the same time.

To learn more about how you can adapt your ARCOS solutions to help tackle COVID-19 challenges better, contact us for a conversation or visit our COVID-19 resource page.

Although storm season is upon us, the world has been facing a different type of crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic. As many businesses shift to a work from home model or temporarily close their doors, utilities and other critical infrastructure companies have continued to work long hours and make sacrifices to keep us safe.

But while functioning under a pandemic, you may find yourself facing a new set of challenges: How do we keep OUR employees safe? By proactively rolling out a COVID-19 Response Plan, Grant County Public Utility quickly changed protocols to better protect their crews and customers.

According to an article published with T&D World, the utility’s response was rapid and extreme:

“In a pandemic, the direct risk isn’t to the infrastructure as it is in a wildfire or natural disaster.  What’s at risk is the availability of the people to get the work done and the ability to keep up under changed processes. Having been hit early with a COVID-19 threat, we’re improvising and learning new protocols, and maybe what we’re learning could help other utilities.”

After recently implementing ARCOS Mobile Workbench, Grant County PUD was able to easily facilitate remote work. With Mobile Workbench, supervisors, customer service, and dispatchers are able to remotely create tickets and distribute them to crews via a mobile device, without ever having to see each other in person. Crews can then update the ticket and mark it complete with the option to add additional notes. This new approach replaced an old fax-based system, and allowed crews in the field and employees at home to communicate within social distancing guidelines.

Besides optimizing new technology, Grant County PUD made other changes to help their operations run smoothly and safely during the pandemic:

1. Allow non-essential workers to work remotely. Grant County permitted all office personnel to borrow any devices or office equipment that would help them work comfortably from home. They were also able to deliver office chairs, and offer a temporary reimbursement program so employees wouldn’t be burdened with extra costs during the transition.
2. Bolster your internal communications. It’s important to have a streamlined process for communicating updates with your organization so everyone is in the loop. Consider a weekly email or living document that everyone can bookmark and access with the most up-to-date information.
3. Socially distance and sanitize. Encourage your workforce to uphold the 6ft+ social distance, or work remotely. Ask that employees wear face-masks, and thoroughly sanitize all work stations and equipment regularly.
4. Keep safety first. We know that utilities value safety above all. Social distancing, working from home, and proper sanitization are all considered basic safety protocols during this time.
5. Finally, take a deep breath and be flexible. None of us are able to see what the future holds, or what will even happen a week from now. Be prepared to make changes that are best for your organization, employees, and customers.

To learn more about Grant County Public Utility District’s pandemic best practices, and how they rolled out their plan, check out their article with T&D World. 

For some quick tips and creative ways to adapt your ARCOS solutions to help you better tackle challenges related to COVID-19 and beyond, visit our COVID-19 resource page.

The recent pandemic has shown us that organizations have to be ready for anything – natural disasters, pandemics, and even cyber-attacks. When the unexpected happens, your demand for staffing, as well as material resources like equipment can change quickly. During events of this magnitude for this pandemic, the amount of time it takes for your company to adjust your resources can be the deciding factor between managing an emergency event smoothly or taking a large hit to your productivity and bottom line due to inefficiencies caused by manual processes. Whether you’re using the Incident Command System or another emergency response structure, the ability to stand up your teams and fill those important roles in your org chart is critical. Fortunately, there are solutions that allow for a real-time view of all of your resources that are truly available (versus what is on the schedule), so that you can make quick decisions based on the type of event you are experiencing.

One of the most important factors during any emergency event is consistent and clear communication. Many times you need to get an emergency message out to your workforce, whether it’s a quick notification to inform your workers that shifts are changing to lower transmission of a virus, that some departments are working remotely, or you may even need to notify specific groups (such as Maintenance) that a piece of equipment needs to be serviced. With an automated solution, you could even send messages to help support the current social distancing measures we’re experiencing, by letting workers know of a new government order or changing work conditions. By automating some of these tedious tasks, you can remove wasted time from critical operations and allow your managers to focus on productivity and safety. 

During a pandemic like we are facing today, or other unexpected emergencies, real-time information is critical. With full situational awareness into your workforce availability and resources, decision-makers can assess, respond and handle unexpected circumstances quickly. Automation of some of these manual processes and having a single source of truth for all of your resources can help maintain production or service levels when it counts – not to mention prevent loss of revenue due to workforce gaps or equipment issues. 

Are you seeing the theme here? What do companies need to manage their workforce and operations at their maximum potential during emergencies? Information and automation of manual, disparate processes. That’s why the ARCOS platform will also act as a centralized, cloud-based location to scale resources up and down according to your emergency plan and business rules, provide real-time information and communicate instantly when it counts. With ARCOS’ robust API, you can even pull in data from legacy systems such as payroll, human resources, asset management or work management systems in order to ensure you have the full picture of your operations. Once the smoke clears and business as usual resumes, you can do a full historical look back so you’ll be prepared for the next emergency. Whether it’s daily operations or the next unprecedented event, ARCOS will keep you and everyone in your organization on the same page.

During unprecedented emergencies, managing the shifts of your employee resources can be challenging. Right now you might be dealing with unexpected absences due to illness, quarantine and even PTO to cover childcare needs. It’s equally important not only to empower your employees to be able to manage their schedule, but also to innovate by developing creative shifts to keep people safe and lower the chance of transmission. If you could automate some of these historically manual processes, your employees would have the ability to trade and swap shifts on their own, within established business guidelines, without having to get a supervisor involved. Not only that, but you could open up new non-standard shifts and fill them in accordance with union or business rules without ever having to email or pick up the phone.

If there’s one thing that COVID-19 will do, it’s going to help us all improve our business continuity and emergency preparedness, as well as highlight some of the inefficiencies we all have in our organizations, especially for shift management and workforce availability. You’ve had to create new processes, procedures, and even new ways of scheduling and managing shifts to help comply with social distancing and keep workers from transmitting illness to one another. You may have also had a large part of your administrative staff working remote for the first time. Trying to gather information about who’s working, next up for overtime, on sick leave, has requested a shift trade, etc. can be extremely difficult if you have disparate processes or systems in place to track your data and availability. Using an automated system like ARCOS can provide a single source of truth and full situational awareness during both business as usual and an unexpected emergency situation. By having this situational awareness, you can manage all of your shifts efficiently within your business rules, and automatically notify all employees and scale your workforce up and down depending on your needs. Using a system like this every day, no matter what the situation, will help you build trust with your employees, executives and regulators because you know where your resources are at all times, every day, during daily operations or emergencies.

Our solutions can help make the difference between an informed, quick response to a crisis or having to manage inefficiencies that will affect your bottom line. Saving operating costs by reducing the amount of supervisor time, maintaining minimum staffing levels and ensuring the maximum safety of your workforce seems like a win-win. Helping your workforce feel safe and in control of their schedules during an emergency will not only keep them focused and productive, but it will also later help you with retention and to attract new skilled labor. With automation, you can improve your organization and consistently handle the next big emergency.

Unfortunately, legacy systems don’t always communicate like you need them to. But after all of the time, training, costs, and effort going into installing your trusty tech, you want to make sure you’re maximizing your current investments through updated systems that can help your work management and outage management integrate better, keeping your organization on track. Think about it this way: New tech can actually help you get more money out of your previous investments.

Here are five ways new technology can help bolster your current investments:

1. Improving schedule details across the board. Using an integration strategy to connect your systems will provide indisputable visibility for managers, stakeholders and employees, and allows crews to be scheduled more efficiently when you can see the full picture.
2. Creating one source of truth. When data is manually pulled from one system and then entered into another, things can get a little jumbled. Some information could go missing, and there is always the risk of human error. Newer systems can automate these processes by feeding data with an API, saving time and potential miscommunications.
3. Improving efficiency with the ability to use the same systems for both blue sky and events. If everyone is familiar with your legacy systems and the new tech, time can be saved by eliminating the need for training, and knowing that all of your information is automatically up-to-date.
4. Enhancing benchmarking by having better, quicker access to reporting metrics. Supervisors can easily extract data to confirm that crews are consistently being productive across your work centers.
5. Helping cross the finish line during the last mile stretch. Even if your project has been carefully planned for weeks, an issue could pop-up the day of, turning everything on its head. For example, during the morning kick-off of your next large project, you may only have four out of five crew members available due to illness or an emergency. What do you do now? Do you move ahead with the four crew members you have or reschedule for another day? Having full access to all your systems can help your organization make educated decisions under pressure.

From out in the field to the home office, ARCOS Resource Management helps utilities better manage work and people together, be it blue sky or a major event. And when your systems are able to talk to each other and efficiently share information you can trust, planning, proficiency, and reporting all become a lot easier. Learn more about ARCOS solutions at https://www.arcos-inc.com/solutions/. 

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.