Industry - Electric Utility

Field Automation for Industrial and Commercial Electrical Contractors

Our client is an Industrial and Commercial Electrical Contractors company in the oil and gas industry. Our client offers extensive oilfield electrical services, including new construction, overhead distribution, powerline maintenance, motor changeouts, reconduct, trouble calls, pole changeouts, underground services, and building facilities. The company’s objective was to streamline the entire field job reporting and enhance the overall field and back-office operating efficiency.

5-MINUTE READ

Introduction

Challenges

Solution

Results

Introduction

Our client provides oilfield electrical services and storm response services. Their services vary from new construction to power restoration and repairs. They provide a broad range of electrical services that require a field service management system to record and report business-critical activity, including efficiently generating accurate invoices. Field Ticketing and personnel Timekeeping, among other features, were of major interest.

Challenges

The manual field ticketing process is administratively intensive, which causes invoicing delays, revenue leakage, and transactional errors.
Inefficient field labor reporting requires field supervisors to approve work hours manually.
Unable to accurately compare actual job cost/pricing to quoted pricing, possibly mispricing future jobs.
They were unable to report field resource utilization.
They were using Multiple price books and contracted pricing in various sources of information.

Solution

Reviewed client’s workflows and demonstrated ways to automate processes digitally.
Provided software features and functionality tailored to meet the client’s field operations requirements.
Configured FieldEquip to provide real-time information via a web portal and our online/offline mobile app.
Provided field inspection and task list form creation and reporting capability.
Improved pricing process for labor, material, and equipment usage with the ability to capture and consolidate multiple tickets for specific jobs.
Provided customer discounted pricing functionality by automatically recognizing customer using our contract management feature.
Automatic transfer of invoicing data to QuickBooks following an easy approval process and practically eliminating transactions and invoicing errors.

Results

Complete automation of field job reporting on one software platform.
Provided the management with easy visibility of historical, current, and planned field activity.
Efficient timekeeping process and reporting by field personnel.
Created a management dashboard for better decision-making.
Significantly reduced administrative and management time seeking business-critical information.
Improved overall field and back-office operating efficiency.

33%

Improved overall field and back-office operating efficiency

>2k hrs

Efficient timekeeping process and reporting by field personnel

1M

Generate prompt error-free customer invoices

Challenges and Opportunity

The current ticketing and invoicing methods and processes required significant manual efforts by our client- an industrial and commercial electrical contractor company. The client was also using a decentralized source of information and transactions, resulting in limited access within the organization.

The oilfield industrial and electrical contractors have been wasting a lot of time using paper-based tickets to document data on the oilfield. Since these field tickets confirm the delivery of goods and services and give an estimate of costs for companies to track their daily expenses, the client faced significant business challenges. They were following the pencil-and-paper process in some parts of their business, costing them time and money.

Paper-based field tickets result in higher days sales outstanding (DSO) – the average number of days required to collect payments after invoicing. The client wanted to digitize the process to ensure a streamlined and efficient job-to-invoice process. They were facing losses due to high DSO caused by manual systems and slow and unnecessary clerical processes involved in paperwork. The manual documentation is error-ridden and highly time-consuming.

The client recognized the drawbacks of using paper-based tickets and wanted to automate the ticketing and invoicing process digitally. They wanted to remove the scope of incomplete information, illegible handwriting, incorrect bill amounts, and data entry errors through automated workflows and consolidated tickets. The company wanted to have an integration to overcome these challenges, stay organized and make documents easily accessible for streamlined workflows and optimal operational efficiency.

Our client needed a unified platform software that would automate the field ticketing process, which is administratively intensive and has resulted in delayed invoices, revenue leakages, and transactional errors. They wanted a software platform that could give them better visibility into field operations, including labor and field supervisors reporting, and easily capture and maintain data from multiple price books and contracted pricing received from diverse sources of information.

Solution

After reviewing the client’s processes and workflows, our team of professionals configured a unified solution using our cloud-based SaaS FieldEquip field service management platform. With FieldEquip’s feature-rich portfolio, we digitally streamlined field transactions by empowering the oil field equipment contractors and field representatives with transaction-reporting capabilities via our intuitive mobile app. FieldEquip’s mobile app gave the client access to inventory data to eliminate discrepancies between the system’s data and actual physical inventory. By enabling field representatives to record installations in real-time, our field service management solution removed the possibility of any missed revenue caused by reporting and invoicing delays.

The adoption of FieldEquip helped the client manage all the field units’ transactional activity and inventory data in the software platform, unifying the client’s processes and workflows for better efficiency. Also, it improved the visibility of historical, current, and planned field activity for the streamlined working of the business.

Industry - Electric Utility

Field Automation for Industrial and Commercial Electrical Contractors

Introduction

Challenges

Solution

Results