Water Utility Management: Mobile Tech for Mobile Workers
Water utilities face increasing pressure to improve efficiency while working with aging infrastructure, tight budgets, and stringent regulations. Mobility has always been essential to water utility workers as service areas are typically scattered. Whatever the challenge, the move from paper-based operations to digital technology in water utility management can help utilities better use resources, improve total cost of ownership (TCO), eliminate lost or unreadable information, save time and increase accuracy.
When out in the field, utility workers need help locating buried infrastructure, handling administrative tasks and improving disaster response. Mobile technologies make a big impact, but don’t just take our word for it.
How Water Utilities Find Success with Mobile Technology
Northumbrian Water provides water and sewage services to 4.5 million people throughout England. When the company was looking for a way to enable field employee access to real-time information, they chose to provide customer service technicians and maintenance teams with rugged tablets. In addition to its durable design, compatibility with existing software and communication made this tablet stand out from the rest in the field of water utility management.
Now, Northumbrian Water’s field workers are equipped with a fleet of devices, connecting them in real-time with the rest of the organization which ultimately improved communication and teamwork. Among other achievements, Northumbrian Water was also able to gather faster response and documentation of incidents and more accurately locate utilities through the use of Panasonic’s FZ-G1 rugged tablet.
How to Get Started With Water Utility Management
It’s clear that mobile technologies provide solutions for the challenges that the utility industry experiences every day. The solutions can be flexible and scalable, further improving operations, worker satisfaction and customer service. Additional benefits include automated meter reading to eliminate human error, instant notifications for service calls, better asset and system performance tracking and automated work order scheduling.
Panasonic addresses the needs of the utility industry. To learn more and get started automating paper processes and choosing the best mobile device for your application, download the whitepaper.