Concord Utilities Services has earned a reputation of innovation by partnering with utilities, municipalities, and equipment manufacturers to advance the future of utility technology through mass deployments of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and utility surveys. Operating multiple projects across the United States that stretch from months to years, Concord Utilities Services has guided the installation of millions of meters and endpoints.
Operating as a trusted extension of the municipalities and utilities they serve, the Concord Utilities management team is focused on ensuring professionalism, operating efficiency, and a culture of safe practices across their field workforce. Attention to safety and standards spans all aspects of operations, including both the Concord work processes and the Concord-branded field equipment used for all projects.
Promoting Safety Training in the Field
The Concord Utilities safety program focuses on continuous safety training, along with rigorous adherence to standardized processes for regulatory compliance. Additional safety training emphasis is placed upon the unique regional and environmental safety needs of each project. As an innovator, Concord Utilities was an early adopter of technology to support field safety training, providing the workforce with access to safety training videos and documents.
However, as the company grew, Manager of Safety and Logistics, Candice Mello, recognized the need to modernize the digital tools used to promote safe operations and efficiency on the frontlines. While providing good safety content, their old solution was not flexible enough to automate the breadth of safety and operating procedures the team felt they needed to address. This led to lower engagement with the field and shifted more of the burden onto management staff to ensure adherence to standards and safety compliance. In addition, the solution could not provide the visibility and analytics across all the Concord Utilities projects that Candice needed without significant manual data manipulation outside the system.
Engaging the Field Workforce to Boost Safety
Candice and team turned to ROO.AI to modernize their safety and logistics operations and boost engagement with the field workforce. With ROO.AI, Concord Utilities was able to “stream” the existing safety training content in the ROO.AI app, providing an easier, more intuitive user experience. The team built an easily accessible library of training and, using the task management capabilities within the ROO.AI system, Candice assigned project-specific safety and skills training to individuals and teams based on a variety of factors, including skill requirements and environmental conditions for each project.
With ROO.AI they were also able to automate Job Site Safety Inspections, Incident Reporting, Vehicle Inspections and Equipment Assignments, as well as automate the process of maintaining current vehicle registrations and required project regulatory documents on site. And because all this was available through the ROO.AI mobile app, this provided a valuable “self-service” capability in the field that lessened the burden on the central office. Additionally, with all processes tracked and data in a single system, ROO.AI automated the reporting Candice used to do manually. With ROO.AI customizable dashboards, Candice has visibility for all the safety processes and compliance metrics across the various projects Concord Utilities operates.
Better Engagement Equals Better Compliance, Safety and Efficiency
Feedback from the field is positive with easier, faster inspections and in-app assignments for safety training. With ROO.AI’s built-in visibility to training and inspection completions, workers are more accountable for adherence to required procedures and compliance is improved. The system has also facilitated communications between Candice and the project teams. Instead of emails and messages, ROO.AI task management provides easy visibility to both the field and management team regarding what needs to be done and when it is completed. And having access to all the documents and SDS they need on the spot, helps the field workforce get their jobs done more safely and efficiently.
Take a Little Time to Go Faster
The ROO.AI Concierge team works closely with every customer to create the customized training workflows, inspections and analytics that will meet the business’s unique requirements, minimizing the burden on the customer to build forms or reports. After implementing ROO.AI across all their project teams, Candice offers this advice to companies adopting ROO.AI. She recommends identifying a point person to lead the project and specific team members in the field to learn the system and be available locally as leads for the workers on site. She also recommends spending some time upfront in the project to understand how the business’s terminology and needs are represented in the ROO.AI system. Once you have a handle on that mapping, she says, you make progress very quickly.
