Utility Resource Management Blog

Columbus, Ohio – December 5, 2017

ARCOS^® LLC has implemented its Software-as-a-Service ARCOS CallOut® and Scheduling solution at the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Tennessee American Water to automate how the utility’s distribution department responds to customer emergencies. For Tennessee American Water, a subsidiary of American Water, responding to emergencies includes making calls to the utility’s employees to locate available crews to restore water main breaks and shut off meters during after-hours, unplanned events.

“The ARCOS system reduces by as much as 30 minutes the time it takes us to get a crew assembled and out into the field to shut off water and begin repairs,” says Casey Allen, operations superintendent for Tennessee American Water. “With a large main break, water can quickly damage a road, adjacent land, or even surrounding structures. One break can exceed several thousands of dollars of damage.” Read More

Columbus, Ohio – November 16, 2017

ARCOS LLC is implementing its ARCOS^® Callout and Scheduling Suite to help Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC) expedite electric service restoration, focus on safety and reduce the utility’s System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), which is the total annual duration of outage interruptions per customer.

“The ARCOS software will automatically find and contact our employees. Instead of spending their valuable time on the phone, our system operators will be able to activate ARCOS with only a few clicks and then focus on critical tasks such as high-voltage switching or coordinating restoration work with service technicians in the field,” says Dan Swingle, vice president of System Operations for NOVEC. “We’re hoping that ARCOS will reduce our service restoration times, which will also help us meet our SAIDI goal.”

NOVEC’s 2016 SAIDI was 45.79 minutes, calculated without outages related to major events. The utility’s five-year average SAIDI, excluding major events, is 49.56 minutes. J. D. Power and Associates’ 2017 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction study placed NOVEC second among the 138 largest electric utilities in the nation. NOVEC also ranked second in Power Quality and Reliability, the largest contributor to overall customer satisfaction, according to the study.

“We always look for cost-effective ways to improve performance in the operations division, but at our high level of achievement, it’s increasingly difficult to reduce SAIDI. We expect ARCOS to give us an edge through automation,” adds Swingle. “If an automated callout process gets our people to work faster, then we’ll be able to restore power faster.”

NOVEC has been using a labor-intensive process to monitor minimum callout requirements for approximately 215 union employees. Through its partnership with ARCOS, the Cooperative expects to reduce the amount of staff time it takes to initiate callouts and track responses. According to Swingle, NOVEC administrators, on average, spend an hour per day documenting callouts; sometimes that climbs to three or four hours during a busy event.

“We’ve also had major events that required operators to spend 9 to 10 hours making callouts, which diverted their focus from their primary job – restoring power to NOVEC customers,” says Swingle.

With ARCOS, operators and staff can concentrate solely on service and safety, instead of tallying callout requirements and resolving complaints, which can easily require an hour per incident. Through automation of the crew assembly and deployment process, NOVEC expects to improve overall outage response and, thereby, reduce service restoration times, while maintaining its high employee safety standards. The data provided by the ARCOS system will also enable final event reports to be produced quickly and accurately. In addition to its union workforce, NOVEC plans to add another 107 employees to the ARCOS system. This will enable system operators to reach all or specific groups of employees with alerts, news or requests for assistance.

“Comparing the cost of ARCOS to what we’ve spent administratively on manual callouts clearly justified the investment in the ARCOS system,” adds Swingle.

About NOVEC

NOVEC, headquartered in Manassas, Virginia, is a not-for-profit corporation that provides electricity to more than 166,000 metered customers in Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William, Stafford, and Clarke counties, the City of Manassas Park, and the Town of Clifton. It also supplies natural gas and energy products and services to consumers in the Washington, D.C., region. The utility serves more customers than any electric co-op in Virginia and is one of the largest electric cooperatives in the United States.

About ARCOS LLC

ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering resource management SaaS solutions to the utility industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and resource management daily and during emergencies, ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award-winning solution helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS resource management software at www.arcos-inc.com. ARCOS CallOut® and ARCOS Crew Manager® are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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Columbus, Ohio – October 19, 2017

ARCOS LLC has again won a place on the Columbus Business First Fast 50 – the annual list of the 50 fastest-growing emerging companies in Central Ohio. The Fast 50 Award recognizes companies for financial growth and performance over the past three years. ARCOS has made the list nine times in the last 11 years, the most appearances by any of the 2017 honorees according to Columbus Business First. This year ARCOS ranks #25.

“Since we last appeared on the Fast 50 list in 2014 we’ve launched a variety of new products, acquired two competitors and expanded internationally into the Canadian utility market,” said Bruce Duff, chief executive officer of ARCOS LLC.

American and Canadian electric, gas and water utilities along with power generation plants rely on ARCOS to keep service running. ARCOS resource management solutions help utilities respond to both after-hours and major events; restore service by quickly and safely assembling crews; and report on the outcome, which informs executives, first responders, regulators, media and the public. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. households are served by utilities that use ARCOS technology to accurately track restoration time and speed up the mobilization of crews.

“With our solutions, contacting utility crews and reporting on the outcome of restoration work literally happens with the click of a button from a laptop and any mobile device,” adds Duff.

The flagship ARCOS® Callout and Scheduling Suite is a software-as-a-service platform that utility managers use to automatically assemble available crews, analyze crew response and report outcomes. The ARCOS Damage Assessment solution helps shorten the process of surveying damage caused by major events like Harvey and Irma from days to hours. The newest ARCOS product, Resource Assist™, automates the manual process of requesting and managing third-party resources and equipment for restoring services during major events or when needed. Other products from ARCOS chart crew staffing and time worked, so utilities can manage crew safety, gauge restoration costs and quickly respond to requests.

About ARCOS LLC

ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering resource management SaaS solutions to the utility industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and resource management daily and during emergencies, ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award-winning solution helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS resource management software at www.arcos-inc.com. ARCOS CallOut® and ARCOS Crew Manager® are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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Columbus, Ohio – October 3, 2017 

ARCOS has released a software solution called Resource Assist™ – a new addition to its Resource Management platform – that clarifies and automates the often manual process of determining the number of available contractors and equipment for restoring utility services and securing commitments for these resources, especially during major events.

Resource Assist replaces a utility’s myriad handmade spreadsheets, phone calls, texts and emails with real-time data including a contract crew’s make-up, location, availability and contact information. The solution automates requests for contract crews and the process by which contract crews become available within a utility company’s ARCOS platform.

“On average a utility looks to about 20 contract companies for restoration assistance,” says Matt Mikula, senior director of Product Management at ARCOS. “When managers face an event, they begin an hours-long, manual and bulky process to reach contractors and verify who can assist with restoration. For events like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, contractors and utility crews number in the tens of thousands.

“With Resource Assist, outreach and reporting literally happens with the click of a button from a laptop or mobile device; RA is a high value restoration assistance tool,” adds Mikula.

As a utility plans for a forecasted storm, managers can use Resource Assist to request the desired number of crew types and confirm their availability with a few keystrokes. Along the way, Resource Assist provides Notifications and Alerts to approved users, ensuring key information is waiting for them.

Contractors respond to utility requests via their own portal within Resource Assist. Once there, contractors can view where all their resources are, respond to utility requests, input information about their crews, pre-build their crews and even swap crew members in the event a worker with a particular skill is needed elsewhere or becomes sick. Since updating Resource Assist is an electronic process, any changes contractors make become immediate updates for any utility using the solution.

For contractors not yet in Resource Assist, a utility can still use it to document phone or email requests, allowing utilities to standardize on one process and tool. Utilities can invite their contractors to participate directly, via an integrated connection request and invite system. Resource Assist captures all relevant request data along the way and identifies trends, crew status and data for reconciling invoices.

“When regional outages spawn mutual assist events, RMAG governance takes over and Resource Assist supports a utility in identifying crews to offer the RMAG via output in a Common Roster,” adds Mikula. “If supported, utilities can import the Common Roster to other tools the RMAG uses, or Resource Assist can integrate via web services. Resource Assist does not overlap with the RMAG process.”

About ARCOS LLC

ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering resource management SaaS solutions to the utility industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and resource management daily and during emergencies, ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award-winning solution helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS resource management software at www.arcos-inc.com.  ARCOS CallOut® and ARCOS Crew Manager® are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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Columbus, Ohio – September 11, 2017

ARCOS® LLC has implemented its Software-as-a-Service ARCOS CallOut® and Scheduling solution at the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) – Oregon’s largest publicly owned water and electric utility – to expedite the restoration of water main breaks and power outages.

“Before ARCOS, any report of a broken water main or electric outage after normal business hours came to our Operations Control Center,” said Larry Longworth, the transmission and distribution dispatch supervisor for EWEB. “We constantly kept track of which water troubleshooter was on call, and once notified, the troubleshooter would pull a paper list of crews and spend 45 minutes or more calling crew members to assemble a team to fix a water main or lateral break.”

EWEB now relies on ARCOS to automatically track all available water troubleshooters and the crews able to respond to and restore service interruptions. Water troubleshooters carry tablets in their trucks to access ARCOS. With the ARCOS app, they make an automated callout to assemble a crew from a list of available workers, while deciding which valves to shut off or throttle down.

“With automated callout, our water troubleshooters have more time to gather equipment from the yard or study maps to restore service in the quickest, safest way,” added Longworth.

According to Longworth, the flexibility of the ARCOS solution is its strength. Until ARCOS, EWEB’s electric operations relied on 21 paper lists indicating which crews across in which groups were available for after-hours work. Each group’s list owner regularly called and emailed the EWEB Operations Center to update crew members’ availability. By recreating these lists in the ARCOS platform, EWEB’s dispatch desk has given the list owners control to electronically update and change crew status. The ARCOS solution automatically tracks these changes, including the callouts. Longworth says electronic tracking eliminated workers’ complaints about missing a call or being skipped over to work additional hours.

“I can report on and analyze anything that’s happened with a callout,” said Longworth. “Until you have ARCOS, you don’t know what you can measure.”

According to EWEB, automated callout has saved labor every step of the way. While the utility acknowledges it is tougher to measure the impact on CAIDI, Longworth estimates it is conceivable EWEB has reduced that number by five to 10 minutes with ARCOS.

“ARCOS customer support is exceptional, too,” added Longworth. “Around the clock, people are there who can answer our questions about the system and get us back on track quickly.”

About ARCOS LLC

ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering resource management SaaS solutions to the utility industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and resource management daily and during emergencies, ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award-winning solution helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS resource management software at www.arcos-inc.com. ARCOS CallOut® and ARCOS Crew Manager® are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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Columbus, Ohio – August 21, 2017

For the fourth consecutive year, Inc. magazine has named ARCOS^® LLC to the Inc. 5000, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. This year, ARCOS ranked No. 3,036 on the list, a move up of nearly 400 places from its ranking last year. ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering crew callout and resource management SaaS solutions to the utility industry, which relies on the Ohio-based company to help utility managers and crews respond to major events, restore service and report on the outcomes.

According to Inc. Media, “Companies that made the list, on average, have grown sixfold since 2013. A mere one in ten have made the list four times.”

“Our three-year growth is 109 percent, which is a testament to the dedication and customer focus everyone at ARCOS brings to our clients every day,” says ARCOS CEO Bruce Duff.

The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue is $206 billion, and the companies on this year’s list collectively generated 619,500 jobs over the past three years. Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, is at www.inc.com/inc5000.

“The Inc. 5000 is the most persuasive evidence I know that the American Dream is still alive,” says Inc. President and Editor-In-Chief Eric Schurenberg. “The founders and CEOs of the Inc. 5000 tell us they think determination, risk taking, and vision were the keys to their success, and I believe them.”

The 2017 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2013 to 2016. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2013. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2016. The minimum revenue required for 2013 is $100,000; the minimum for 2016 is $2 million.

About Inc. Media:

Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. Winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in both 2014 and 2012. Total monthly audience reach for the brand has grown significantly from 2,000,000 in 2010 to over 18,000,000 today. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

About ARCOS LLC

ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering crew callout and crew management SaaS solutions to the utility industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and management daily and during emergencies, ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award-winning solution helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS emergency resource management software at www.arcos-inc.com.  ARCOS and Crew Manager are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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Columbus, Ohio – July 25, 2017

ARCOS® LLC has acquired the utility services division of Parsippany,
N.J.‐based Macrosoft, including the New Jersey company’s Resources on‐Demand (RoD) software and its
weather and utility news portal named Outagecentral.com.

“Macrosoft’s utility division aligns with how we help utilities across North America locate, assign and
track crews and resources,” says Bruce Duff, chief executive officer of ARCOS. “Our mission is giving any
size utility the technology solutions to respond to events, restore service safely and report on the
outcome. Macrosoft’s utility division adds to the ARCOS solution platform for resource management
that enables utilities to manage events large and small that occur daily.”

Resources on‐Demand customers will continue to receive support and maintenance for their product
from ARCOS.  Jason Singer, director of Macrosoft’s Utility Services Division, will join the ARCOS team as
director of resource management services along with those who developed and support the Resources
on‐Demand product.

“The RoD development and support team are excited to become employees of ARCOS,” says Singer.
“The combination of Macrosoft’s utility services division and ARCOS is well positioned to lead the utility
industry in providing state‐of‐the‐art resource management solutions.”

Macrosoft’s Resources on‐Demand software tracks and supports logistics requests during large‐scale
restoration events. ARCOS will draw from the features and functionality of RoD to aid utility managers
who want to more efficiently link crews with the equipment, lodging and other logistics needed for daily
work and service restoration in the wake of major events. ARCOS intends to leverage features and
functionality from Resources on‐Demand and ARCOS Crew Manager® to provide enhanced capabilities to
customers.

The Macrosoft product complements the ARCOS Resource Management platform, which provides
solutions for:  automated resource call outs, crew and mutual assistance management, mobile field
damage assessments, routine field inspections and resource tracking. The ARCOS Resource
Management platform enables utilities to use one system to manage “blue sky” as well as emergency
events requiring internal and external resources.

ARCOS counts more than 130 utilities as customers including America’s top 25 largest electric and gas
utilities that impact 87 percent of all U.S. electric consumers.

If you have questions about the acquisition, please refer to our F.A.Q. document or  contact us.

About ARCOS LLC
ARCOS is the North American leader in delivering Resource Management SaaS solutions to the utility
industry. ARCOS automates crew assembly and resource management daily and during emergencies,
ultimately helping to restore energy faster, yet safely, to communities. The award‐winning solution
helps utilities save time and money, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about ARCOS
resource management software at www.arcos‐inc.com.  ARCOS CallOut® and ARCOS Crew Manager®
are registered trademarks of ARCOS LLC.

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