Workflow Management with IoT- The On-Call Nightmare

For utility organizations like Electric Power, Water purification, Wastewater treatment and Natural Gas their businesses operates on a 24/7/365 basis. All of these utility organizations will have technical on-call staff that are dedicated to making sure operations are always on and operating every day of the year. Of course when challenges do arise, many of the problems and outages that occur with these systems happen during non-prime hours (not between 8am and 5pm) and technical staff are “called out” to troubleshoot problems on these systems on both evenings, nights, and weekends when resources are scarce and difficult to manage. In the past systems like SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) that support these groups of technical folks have been isolated (due to IT mandates or other initiatives) and only available on a few computers located in an office or a plant. This means that the technician needs to either make a trip (roll a truck) to an office or plant to get an understanding of the issue via the SCADA system OR roll the truck to the problem area “blind” with no information and maybe not the right tools to fix the challenges. Either of these approaches are costly in both overtime for employees and in extended systems downtime. Getting an “alarm” from the SCADA or monitoring system is only the start but a very vital piece of the puzzle.

An Electrical Municipality working with IoT International was experiencing this exact challenge. The on-call staff would get notified of an alert/alarm via text message for a substation in their electrical distribution system and then would get up and roll a truck first to “understand the problem” via SCADA OR pull into a substation blind about what the problem or problems are risking not have the right equipment to address the challenge in front of them. The municipality has since moved their SCADA monitoring to Skyview the IoT International cloud service. This service for a monthly/yearly fee allows the entire staff to access the system data from anywhere. The Skyview service is already paying huge dividends for the technical staff. Now, when the technical team (on-call person) receives a system alarm notification, weather it be in the middle of the night or on the weekend, they can access the monitoring system from their tablet or phone and get an understanding of the problem BEFORE they ever “roll the truck”! This has already saved time and money for the municipality and has produced a much happier technical staff ready to keep operations running 24/7/365. IoT International provides an IoT software solution Suite that allows communications from both edge to cloud as well as the Skyview platform for visualizing , alarming, trending and reporting on data from real world devices and processes.