Anglian Water hails cloud flexibility with Oracle Field Service
Anglian Water replaces its field work management tool with Oracle Field Service, improving workforce management and productivity.
“Anglian Water is extremely invested in Oracle Field Service. Oracle has been very supportive to help us create our own CoE. I’ve been heavily involved in work management solutions for the past 15 years and this is by far the best client/vendor relationship I have experienced. We are actively involved with the product management team and Oracle’s own CoE, which enables us to influence the roadmap of OFS using our real-world use cases.”
Business challenges
Anglian Water, a regulated water company that provides clean water and water recycling services to 6 million customers in eastern England, was looking for a technology system to manage field services that would give the company greater flexibility and agility than its current solution offered.
Anglian’s mobile app, used to manage field services, was not only clunky and expensive to maintain and upgrade, but it required modifications to be rewritten every time an upgrade was done. It also didn’t give the water company enough visibility into a technician’s location, nor did it enable real-time communication with customers to tell them exactly when a technician would arrive.
Why Anglian Water Chose Oracle
Anglian Water decided to replace its work management tool with Oracle Field Service because it routes and schedules field service technicians using unique time-based, self-learning, and predictive methods. It allows utilities to manage the entire field services lifecycle with capacity planning, intelligent workforce dispatch and locate, team collaboration, actionable analytics, and customer communications.
The Oracle Field Service implementation took just three months within a wider nine-month modernization project. This was quicker and smoother than Anglian Water expected, and Oracle delivered to the price agreed.
Results
Today, Anglian Water is using Oracle Field Service across its asset delivery teams and has begun expansion into customer process areas. In the back office, it is empowering staffers to adopt more customer-centric field services and to make modifications in-house (with support from Oracle’s Field Service product team as needed, and its Center of Excellence, which Oracle helped Anglian Water set up).
Since the migration, Anglian Water has been able to influence design and the overall product roadmap while also testing and deploying innovative ideas faster.
Today, the company can modify to support unique routine operations and use machine learning to create original schedules. Oracle Field Service allows Anglian to optimize the number of back-office schedulers (a role that was historically manual) and gather and send to regulators analytics comparing Anglian Water to other utilities. Regulators can use this information for benchmarking.
In addition, the company now can collect data during routine visits and send it to Anglian’s CRM in real time and also build a backlog of uncompleted work during crises and prioritize tasks once business-as-usual resumes.
Anglian Water has experienced a complete shift from a “black box” configuration of workforce management into full capability to configure and adapt in-house. Each part of the business now owns its routing logic.
Field improvements across the company include minimizing travel time—making the workforce more efficient by reducing repeated trips to a site and also maximizing daily job completion rates, with some areas seeing a more than 7% productivity increase.