First Quartile Consulting
(1QC) is a focused utility benchmarking and consulting firm that offers a powerful combination of benchmarking programs and consulting
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Field Productivity ImprovementIs your organization interested in better understanding opportunities to improve field productivity performance in the current challenging environment? If so First Quartile Consulting is offering a structured, 5-step assessment targeted at measuring, understanding, and quantifying improvement opportunities (people, process/analytic, technology, organization and regulatory) and the related benefits.
Situation: Utilities need to improve Electric T&D Field Crew Productivity to meet the challenges of the day. To have productive crews, the work process must be efficient and effective. The work order process generally involves a designer developing a bill of materials, drawings, and a cost estimate (including labor which might be 30% or more). Support processes (e.g. the materials system, fleet operations, design process, outage planning) must deliver the expected service levels to enable the crew to perform productively
Complication: Even with a good work management process and effective support systems, plenty can still go wrong in the field, starting with unfavorable conditions (e.g. weather or inaccessible location), lack of customer readiness, and line availability problems.
Question: How do you design a work management process that maximizes field crew productivity? And what measures are helpful in coming up with initiatives and showing progress.
Answer: A properly designed work management process can take many of the factors into account and make the job go as smooth as possible. Several vendors offer software products that provide many of the important work management tasks.
The corporate “culture”, especially to create positive change, is extremely important to yield results. One observation from top performers is the cultural changes necessary to produce a safety conscious environment, are the same needed for a productive environment. One important element of a positive corporate culture is the discipline to measure and act on performance information.
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