Black & Veatch's Field And Workforce Management Transformation

Black & Veatch’s (B&V) clients include large telecom companies with hundreds, even thousands of technicians who install and repair equipment on a daily basis, to leading satellite companies that provide complex tracking of ship fleets. Due to advancements in connectivity, large infrastructure projects and field teams are becoming highly distributed and B&V wanted to take a proactive approach to ensuring real-time visibility into its workforce. “We want to be proactive about the future of work because this is where things are headed. The more tech savvy our workforce is, the better positioned our workforce is,” said Barbie Bigelow, former CIO at B&V.

For B&V, moving away from traditional field service management included:

• increasing back-office visibility into the field including tracking real-time job status and time to completion
• improving operational efficiencies by digitizing and standardizing workflows for its fiber-splicing technicians

“We feel like our partners in the field [tower/fiber crews] are at such a disadvantage compared to the people in the office,” said Dave Simmons, sr. director of tech and innovation at B&V. “We have to close that gap. They are the critical lynchpin into 5G and the next generation of telecom. In the context, there is so much opportunity from a work perspective that we could do 50 percent more work, which means we could become more efficient with the current workforce and hire additional workers.”

B&V knew they needed an innovation partner and a centralized digital solution that could improve workforce productivity and connectivity. This was the beginning of the B&V and Zinier partnership.