How Morrison Utility Services Manages Complex, Multi-task Field Work

By Kaitlin McCready, TOA Technologies

In this ongoing “Tales from the Road” series, we will feature smart people who have taken on mobile workforce challenges, the stories about how they conquered them and the lessons they learned along the way.

Andy Carter works in the very traditional utilities industry. But his approach to field operations and enterprise technology is anything but traditional.

Carter is the business process improvement director for Morrison Utility Services, a UK-based supplier of infrastructure repair. They provide maintenance services to electricity, gas, water and telecoms companies, mostly on highways. And Carter had a heck of a business process improvement task in front of him.

“Quite often [the supervisors would] be in the office till 8:30 p.m. trying to get the work allocated for the next day,” Carter said. “You can work that way with a small volume [of jobs], but as it increases, especially around filling in the holes in the road, it’s just too hard.”

If you work in any kind of infrastructure maintenance or repair business, you know what he’s talking about. You might have two appointments a day, but each one has 20 different tasks that must go in a certain order – and each one requires a different field employee with different certifications, and maybe even a specific vehicle.

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