Increasing Utility Worker Productivity for JEA
Persistent connections deliver 30 percent productivity increase. The eighth-largest community-owned utility in the United States, JEA (formerly known as Jacksonville Electric Authority) provides electricity, water and sewer services to more than 750,000 accounts in northeast Florida. Its 600 field technicians are tightly scheduled, and reliable access to applications is essential to expediting task completion and serving customers responsively. The Mobility XE mobile VPN from NetMotion Wireless is the vital link that maintains data connections to those applications, making workers maximally productive.
About the Deployment
When problems arise, JEA’s field technicians are the first responders for the utility. They are busy year-round, but the urgency goes up several notches during hurricane season. Technicians are called on to handle breaks in water and sewage mains, fix meters, respond to power outages, and turn service on and off. They rely on access to a mix of off-the-shelf and custom software including e-mail, dispatch, CRM and GIS. In addition, electrical service-delivery applications assist in locating equipment, especially underground. With 800 square miles of territory to roam, workers need to connect via multiple cellular carriers to cover the entire service area.
Fewer Connection Hassles, More Working Hours
Before adopting Mobility XE, field workers reported that they were losing valuable time with the wireless system whenever they were forced to switch to a new network. As they drove between locations and experienced connection loss, they had to pull over to the side of the road and log back in to the system. As Bonnie Anderson, JEA systems administrator, explains, “Often, multiple attempts were made until reconnection, a process that could take twenty minutes. Additionally, service operators had to connect to applications via the network, which would also fail when out of range. They would have to reopen applications and retype data that had been lost.” This was an unacceptable loss of productivity, not to mention a source of irritation for field workers.
After a thorough RFP process, JEA deployed Mobility XE and the problems disappeared. Workers log in one time, at the start of their session, and remain connected throughout the workday with no need to re-authenticate when a connection goes down.
Greater Productivity, Present and Future
In five years since implementing Mobility XE, JEA has noted a 30% increase in daily productivity for its field workers, more home service completed, and more trouble tickets resolved.
As Anderson declares: “Mobility XE is critical to JEA going forward, as well as important to our electrical, water and sewer techs today. They would never let us take the solution away from them.”