Solutions
SevenX Energy
An Operations Manager's Perspective
"In order to be able to manage a national operation successfully you really need to be able to see what is going on easily, quickly and in real time. It just doesn't help to find at the end of a day when the work should have come in, that one of your remote readers didn't turn up on his reading rounds. In our business a late round (that means after 17:00 on the day it was scheduled) is a missed round, so you really have to be on top of things all the time.
Because SevenX is communicating readings back as the readers do them, we are able to track and see how each reader is doing. We can even see exactly where they are, and where they will be going next. Never again will we be surprised to find a round not there on time. We can assign another reader to pick up the round or even to help the reader on the round and do that on the fly, without the new reader having to come into the office to upload the reading data as they have to do with other systems.
The non-scheduled work assignment process means a massive reduction in time allocating and tracking individual jobs, as it is a fully automated process in SevenX. The work comes in and is assigned to the appropriate reader immediately, without any manual intervention. This gives us a vastly improved capability in job turnaround, as well as a reduction in back office manning requirements. If a job is urgent, we can now turn it around in a couple of hours by using SevenX to immediately send it out automatically to the nearest reader. When compared to the couple of days it could take with the old systems, it means our customers now have a significant point of difference in the level of service offering that they can offer to their customers.
Because SevenX retains a record of the reading round and all the property details, ongoing scheduling of work is a very simple matter of setting up an annual reading calendar. Any changes to the reading round or the property details are updated from the customer on a regular basis, thereby keeping the database in line with the customer's systems, this means no more manual scheduling of reading rounds month after month. Everyone knows what is coming up and when it is due with no surprises and best of all, no back office manpower required to continually build up reading rounds.
The reporting capabilities of SevenX allow me to track performance per area, per retail customer, or per reader. It gives me full access to the reading statistics so we can make whatever changes we need to make before anything becomes an issue.
Because all our readers are contractors we need to manage them all individually and provide full billing and pro-forma invoicing capabilities. SevenX has been designed with this specifically in mind and manages it at the touch of a button. This means my billing section is greatly reduced and the time taken to prepare and generate invoices for 170 different contractors has dropped from 14 days to a couple of days and this is only because we have to deal with ad hoc costs manually due to their nature. Without the ad hoc costs, the 14 days would become 2 minutes! That's a substantial saving. Of course SevenX can handle an employee type operation just as easily.
There is no way I could have managed the nationwide operations management of our business reading over seven million meters per year throughout New Zealand and the very significant growth we have experienced over the last three years without the help of SevenX. At least, not without having doubled up our manning levels."
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CEO/Business
benefits
