Over the past 18 months Northpower has worked hard to transform what was a labour intensive, manual and paper-based system to a new, connected ‘system of systems’ where real-time decisions are now made by AI and automation.

Traffic conditions, the proximity of available engineers, engineer attributes - such as capabilities and fatigue management - are key factors on deciding which resource is the best to assign. These decisions happen hundreds of times a day at Northpower and for 95% of reactive tasks, automation makes the decisions, not people.

Click Field Service Edge has been a key component in the delivery of our field service transformation, but is only one part of the ecosystem which encompasses much more than the tool alone.

"Introducing automation has shifted focus from time consuming and repeatable tasks, to an enhanced customer experience, simply by focusing on the high risk jobs to ensure all agreed service levels are met or exceeded,” says John Benson, System Team Lead for Northpower's mobility project.

"Buy-in from field workers can be challenging and if the tool doesn't work first time, it’s difficult to get that trust back so you can try again. With implementations like ours, we've had to adapt and react quickly to an ever-changing landscape.

We've spent time talking to peers in New Zealand and abroad, taking lessons learned and applying them to our instance where possible,” he says.

Over the past six months Northpower has been focussed on fine tuning, learning and analysing the data we're now harnessing in real time. We're now focussed on optimising workflows and offering our customers real-time visibility into our task queues.

Communication is a huge part of our service delivery and now that our field force are well on their digital transformation journey, we can continue to improve our service to our customers.