This is an important trend, and we hear from customers that they want to find the best way (with minimal impact to the business) to enable productivity for their workers, especially those who are spread out over a large geographic area, managing critical pieces of the business like field maintenance, outage response, and mobile operations. It is the forward-looking utilities that are prioritizing mobility as part of an organization-wide transformation so they can operate on a common data model that covers the utility, customers, and regulatory reporting. Add cloud computing to the mix and you have many compelling opportunities to bring new business models to market quickly, as well as support maintenance and operational teams over distributed areas.

The Connected workforce

Enabling people to work where they want—in the office, on the go, and at home—and making it easy for them to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and even customers around the world is key to innovation. With unlimited computing capacity in the cloud and rich data platforms providing real-time information, utilities can now build systems of intelligence with digital information to drive transformations both in performance and agility across operations, customer engagement, research and development, and community relations.

Products like Office 365, Yammer and Windows devices can enable a highly connected employee experience that combines communication, collaboration, social, and mobility anywhere, anytime across any device. The cloud as a platform, such as Microsoft Azure, then delivers rich business intelligence that utilities can use to deliver innovative services, maintain smoother operations and compliance, and become a more customer-centric organization. Providing mobile access to enterprise data, scheduling, alerts, and line-of-business systems in the field can help ensure safety, facilitate maintenance, and quick response to outages. And alert-driven tools and KPIs help keep individuals informed about incidents and outages.

Productivity in action

One innovative energy company that is using cloud-based productivity to improve its business is Veriown Energy. Using Microsoft Office 365 and Office 365 apps, Veriown sales representatives are on the road helping customers to go off-grid in locations across the United States. Sales representatives use Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus and SharePoint Online to work better as a virtual team and to co-author sales proposals in real time. They also store their documents in Microsoft OneDrive for Business online storage where they can be accessed and shared anywhere there’s an Internet connection. The combination of these two capabilities gives sales reps almost universal access to their documents on any device.

Veriown says that their business flows seamlessly no matter where teams are working. Project execution team members, who oversee the installation of on-site energy generation plants, are able to stay current with on-site developments by sharing and editing project-related documents from the job site and the office. It’s a great example of how one company created an extensible business productivity platform that is mobile, agile, and productive. And, by avoiding on-premises solutions and retiring third-party products, Veriown saved US $27,468.

As utilities consider how to offer new programs and services, similar to Veriown’s distributed generation business model, we encourage you to read more about how Microsoft’s vision for productivity and mobility can help you get started transforming your business today.

The post Taking the office with you: powering up mobile productivity for utilities appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

This summer has been a busy season for Microsoft and its industry partner community, including our annual Worldwide Partner Conference activity and our 2015 Partner of the Year Awards.

One stand-out and important partner-related announcement I wanted to highlight for the power & utilities industry is Microsoft’s acquisition of FieldOne. As a world-class provider of field service management solutions, this is an exciting opportunity for us to help energy and utilities organizations better manage and deliver service to their customers in the field.

As Microsoft’s Corporate VP Bob Stutz explains in the announcement, “FieldOne was built from the ground up to leverage Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and this means that our customers can take advantage of its capabilities right away.”

That full set of capabilities includes work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities, mobile collaboration, and even upselling and cross-selling. It’s cloud-based, so you can adjust routing on the fly and deliver service estimate times with a smaller window. It also enhances the mobile experience by working across different devices, allowing your teams to access information both on- and off-line.

Incorporating Field One capabilities into our portfolio of technologies including Microsoft Azure, Cortana Analytics and Power BI, we can further help utilities achieve top customer service and sales performance by enabling rich data capabilities, connected IoT experiences, and predictive service. Companies can track customer activity at all utility touch points and across virtually any mobile device to improve sales and service and transform the customer experience by uniting data to provide a single, 360-degree view of the customer. This also enables utilities to maximize efficiency and minimize costs, and is another proof point of Microsoft’s commitment to reinvent productivity and business processes, build the intelligent cloud and create more personal computing in this mobile-first, cloud-first world.

We look forward to extending this powerful functionality to utilities! To learn more, you can read the full announcement here. And for more information about the FieldOne Sky solutions go here, or try it out, now available for download at the Windows Store.

The post Service in the field gets easier and more mobile with Microsoft’s FieldOne acquisition appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.