Yorkshire Water Battles Harsh English Weather with Toughbook 19s
Yorkshire Water manages 40,000 miles of water and sewage main lines in Yorkshire County, located in Northern England. It also supplies 1.24 billion liters of drinking water every day to local residents.
In an effort to improve worker efficiency, the utility outfitted each of its water engineers and samplers with a Panasonic Toughbook. The company is currently refreshing its Toughbook deployment of 18s with Toughbook 19s.
These Toughbook 18s and 19s are being used to deliver work schedules to engineers, including customer dialogue details and problem histories. At the same time, geographic information system (GIS) software helps locate water assets above and below ground.
Wireless connectivity via 3G broadband and Wi-Fi allows workers to update the utilities database in real time. For example, if a pipe was to burst, engineers can use the device’s touchscreen to draw a map of the impact zone and send that image back to headquarters.
Given England’s rugged terrain and frequent rain and snow, the Toughbook 19’s combination of durability and reliability make it the ideal tool for the utility’s numerous field workers.
“The Toughbook helps us serve our customers better,” Yorkshire Water IT director Alan Harrison said. “By getting data out into the field, our guys can make decisions quickly and feed critical data back into the system. Everyone sees what’s going on.”
For more information on Yorkshire Water’s Toughbook deployment check out the full case study on the European Toughbook site here.
Additionally, see the Toughbook 19s in action in a video of the deployment below:
