Taking the office with you: powering up mobile productivity for utilities
A growing workforce and new ways of working are changing our industry, and many utilities are investing in technology to attract, motivate, and empower their employees. IDC says that this year, the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion, representing 37.2 percent of the total workforce.
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.
