Wialon helps effective maintenance of the electricity network

In this project, Wialon helped to power a new digital center for handling the maintenance teams of the major electricity provider. 

Read the article to know how GGRCO, the Wialon partner, managed to rebuild the whole maintenance dispatching system to achieve such impressive results for the project with 1 million subscribers that it is now planned to use the solution across the whole country.

Problem

EPDC (Electric Power Development Company) is a subsidiary of Tavanir (electricity power generation, transmission, and distribution company) that provides low and medium voltage electricity networks across the country. 121, the emergency services department of the EPDC, is responsible for handling subscriber requests when there is a problem, disturbance, malfunction or accident in the field of electricity. 

EPDC was previously using Wialon just for tracking its field vehicles. But that time, they needed to improve the efficiency of the 121 department and asked our partner GGRCO to develop a solution for that goal.

The main challenge was the manual radio dispatching. An emergency dispatcher had to get all information from subscribers via calls and dispatched the field team via radio. Thus, the dispatcher received detailed feedback from the caller and was looking for an appropriate emergency response team by hand.

Because of the manual process, there were many problems such as retrieving the incorrect info about the accident, inadequate dispatches, delays because of various reasons, wrong accident locations, absence of the subscriber on the location, and last but not least – the system did not have any reports to check the productivity of the field teams. 

As the operator performed all the processes manually, several telephone lines were needed. Sometimes, due to busy lines, the subscriber waited a long time or had no opportunity to provide a report.

All these things needed to be fixed to provide subscribers with fast and effective maintenance services.

Solution

Just employing telematics wasn’t enough for the project and the whole system has been rebuilt to a digital dispatching platform.

Online dashboard

First, the manual phone-radio process was automated. Now, a subscriber informs about the problem via telephone. The subscriber ID and all other data including the subscriber location are automatically loaded, and a task is created.

Then, the system checks the accident category, location, priority (based on predefined priorities for each category) and compares them with the field team parameters, and assigns it to the best-matched team.

The system shows the location of the issues

There are 500 field teams, and each team consists of up to 4 people (engineers and drivers) and a vehicle. Each field team has a vehicle equipped with a tracker. The location data of the team is transferred from the tracker to Wialon, as well as the route, speed and many other parameters of the trip. All communications with field teams are done in their Android application developed by GGRCO. There is also an application that communicates with the EPDC telephony system and the Wialon server.

This is how the mobile app used by field teams looks

From task creating to completing, any field team activity is reflected in the system. Here are just a couple of features implemented (while there is a lot more to cover the whole process).

• The field team continuously reports the current status of the task.
• If the task wasn’t completed due to any reasons, the system re-assigns the task to the next best-matched team.
• The field team has to report many different parameters like the accident cause, the solution implemented, tools and spare parts used.

Monitoring room

Results

The result of this solution implemented are impressive and cover all the effectiveness parameters:

• The field teams arrive at the accident location much faster. Before, it took a field team 3-5 minutes to reach the site, and now this time is reduced to 0-1 minutes. 
• The solution allowed to improve field team productivity by reducing the number of wrong dispatches.
• The managers can now receive monthly or daily reports from each team and identify each team's strengths and weaknesses, making correct business decisions based on that data.

The list of issues with the statuses and reports

• The subscribers don’t waste their time on the busy line or telling their registration info again and again, and they get super fast maintenance services which are also precise.
• Now it’s easier for the field teams too because they get correct and clear information about the location and the details of the issue, which helps them be fast and agile.
• Reports not only about the teams but also about the issues can predict future accidents and prevent them. Which, in turn, leads to cutting the costs on maintenance works and to happier customers.

In conclusion

Here’s what an EPDC representative gets to say about the results of the project:

“On behalf of EPDC, we would like to thank GGRCO for their professional team and product and implementing the smartening of the failure system in the emergency service department of the EPDC. The conversion of radio dispatching into digital dispatching systems and updating the transportation fleet of the EPDC was a great step that would not have been possible without GGRCO. Success in this project happened because of this valuable service and activities by GGRCO. We thanks them for improving the customer service productivity of EPDC.”

If we got you interested, drop us an email message at marketing@gurtam.com, and we will bring you in contact with the developer of the solution. If you have a success story that can flame up our partner community, we are looking forward to getting it at the e-mail address above.