Mobile GIS Improves Utility Field Productivity
Pilgrim Furniture is a furniture retailer located near Plymouth, MA that distributes purchased goods to customers throughout New England. The retailer was using a manual routing and scheduling process that took several hours a day to complete, relying on warehouse managers to build routes based on estimates of travel time. Drivers were then on their own to find the precise customer locations. Pilgrim Furniture manually called customers the night before a delivery to confirm arrival times. The company wanted to save money and time in its delivery operations, automate customer communication, and improve customer relations.
The retailer implemented Visual Control Room (VCR), a route optimization product from InterGIS, to address these manual inefficiencies. With VCR in place, orders are now input from the showroom floor into the VCR system and called up by the warehouse staff when needed. In addition to optimizing routes and schedules, VCR also automatically determines how much furniture can fit onto each truck. Drivers call into the Automatic Phone Response module throughout the day to update their schedules. Customers are able to call the system to automatically confirm delivery times at their convenience. Plus, directions and maps are automatically printed, reducing delays due to lost drivers.
By automatically planning and scheduling delivery routes, Pilgrim reduced the time the process took from several hours to 10 minutes a day. Driver overtime has been virtually eliminated. Pilgrim is able to use the staff that formerly called customers to confirm delivery times for other tasks in the store.
Laurens Electric Cooperative (LEC) is a nonprofit, member-owned electric distribution utility in upstate South Carolina with more than 47,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers. In 2001, LEC determined that it needed to replace its computer-aided design (CAD)-based system with an enterprise GIS (geographical information system). LEC implemented GIS software from ESRI and its business partners Miner and Miner and MESA Solutions. The resulting solution enabled LEC to create a central database that was integrated with its customer information system/financials software and outage management system. The ESRI GIS solution helped LEC accurately track distribution assets for the first time. However, the utility still needed to expand GIS functionality in the field.
The traditional paper map books LEC crews used to locate assets in the field were costly and permitted only limited views of the service area. Any recorded data had to be painstakingly updated in the corporate database. This time-consuming routine led to out-of-date and inaccurate data. Also, once arriving at a service location, field crews needed to call into the office for information regarding the account in question, which led to dispatch radio traffic. LEC needed to find a solution to reduce radio traffic as well as improve data capture while seamlessly working with its existing GIS. "We're constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of our enterprise GIS and extend it," says James Owens, GIS supervisor for LEC. "We recognized that deploying GIS in the field would lead to more accurate, up-to-date information and reduce the time and resources needed to update data in the office."
LEC implemented a mobile mapping solution from ESRI, called ArcPad. ArcPad provides mapping, GIS, and GPS (global positioning system) integration to field users via handheld and mobile devices. MESA Solutions customized ArcPad to meet LEC's requirements, such as creating a geodatabase-to-ArcPad extraction tool. The solution also enables LEC's field workers to capture inspection and maintenance records. The captured data is then imported into the ArcFM (a utilities mapping extension to the enterprise GIS from Miner and Miner) geodatabase for reporting and tracking purposes. The resulting mobile application based on ArcPad is called Field Viewer and runs on HP Compaq 7010 laptops.
With Field Viewer, LEC's field crews can now view their entire service areas while in the field, use the most accurate and up-to-date service data available, and upload data to the enterprise GIS architecture. This workflow has increased productivity and operational efficiency for LEC, while reducing dispatch radio traffic.