For Water Corporation of Western Australia, managing a fleet of mobile devices across a huge geographic area was made much easier with the implementation of Sybase Afaria. Elizabeth Kelleher reports.
Background
The Water Corporation of Western Australia provides water and wastewater services to households, businesses and farms in towns and communities pread over 2.5 million square kilometres in Western Australia. Its Regional customer Services Group is responsible for the delivery of water services across this vast region, while field service crews carry out field operations, maintenance and asset management activities equipped with hand-held computing devices and laptops. The utility originally deployed a mobile computing solution in 2004 to support the enterprise SAP Plant Maintenance (SAP PM) module, but without any capabilities to support mobile device management.
While the mobile computing application enabled field crews to transmit basic information to and from the corporate back-end system (SAP PM), the platform was no longer supported and offered limited application management support, thus increasing the difficulty of managing devices in the field. Field service crews across Western Australia undertake a diverse set of business processes using SAP Work Orders. To support these processes, crew members used corporate mobile applications other than the Work Order application (for example, spatial tools). However, while these applications were linked to the mobile computing application, they were not based on the same technology.
As the existing mobility platform didn’t support remote upgrades, management and maintenance of Water Corporation’s large mobile fleet with multiple applications was a time-consuming and cumbersome process. Rune Mikkelsen, program manager, business initiatives at Water Corporation, says the company only upgraded its PDAs once or twice a year, as a support person had to perform the upgrade on the device. “For field crews, this involved travel to one of our major regional centres, with some being as far away as 300 kilometres from their nearest base,” he says. “Our annual upgrade process took up to two weeks to complete, and involved several support staff.”
“Besides being a time-consuming and disruptive process in our statewide 24/7 operation, the infrequent software upgrades also resulted in functionality issues as our field crews were not always able to use the latest software version available to them, which may have delivered improved business outcomes or resolved technical issues,” says Mikkelsen. “Our field crews were getting increasingly frustrated as the mobile applications were complicated and difficult to handle. This led to user disengagement, with only half of our user base regularly using their PDAs to full capacity.”
The lack of remote training support capabilities was another reason why Water Corporation decided to investigate a more comprehensive mobile device management solution. Previously, field crews needed to undergo training onsite in regional centres, followed by refresher sessions as changes occurred. The initial training typically took three days. Despite this significant investment in training, remote field staff sometimes had trouble
using the application and were unable to effectively obtain assistance when required.
The solution
In 2010, via competitive tender, the Water Corporation implemented a new mobile computing solution based on an SAP plug-in from SkyTechnologies, which could be used to write the application, and Afaria from Sybase to provide mobile device management. HP Openview, which was already being utilised by Water Corporation, was selected for monitoring and a standard PDA was chosen for use in the field. With Afaria, the organisation’s mobile computing support group can proactively manage and secure multiple device types, applications, data and communications critical to supporting field crews.
Over-the-air and on-device encryption, together with advanced mobile security features such as mobile firewall and anti-virus, ensure the best protection against security threats and compliance issues. “We were looking for a robust solution to protect the data on our field service crews’ mobile devices,” says Mikkelsen. “We selected Afaria due to its comprehensive feature set. Afaria was not only the best solution in terms of functionality but also has a low administrative overhead.”
Implementation and challenges
Scope creep, managing user expectations, change management and adjusting the business processes to suit the new technology were key project challenges, which were mitigated by a strong buy-in from management to promote positive cultural change, open communication channels for stakeholders and users, and effective management of expectations.
One of the other key challenges in the implementation stage was that the new Sky mobility application and Afaria solution had to be rolled out alongside Water Corporation’s previous mobile computing system, which meant that CSC had to implement while the initial mobile solution and mobile devices co-existed. Geographical diversity also presented challenges for the roll-out, which had to be done in stages.
“We had to manage the training within that process, so we never let anybody go out [into the field] without being fully trained, and then we went back and reinforced that training,” says David Dixon, CSC mobility support coordinator. Another significant challenge was fleet management – with some of the devices meeting an early demise after being run over by trucks or “drowned”.
According to Dixon, implementing a support strategy that involved on-ground business support, enhanced business support for two years, frequent product evaluation and a governance framework, was central to the project’s success.
Business benefits
Water Corporation field staff now use the new mobile application and their devices to provide updates to the SAP system with job status, work performed and event details, as well as information about crew labour allocation and materials usage. A work order typically changes status between five and 10 times during its lifecycle, with more than 400,000 work orders created annually in the system.
The mobile device management platform also allows the Water Corporation to send work to crews in near real-time when their PDAs are communicating via NextG to the enterprise systems, and it has now significantly grown the number of handheld devices.
“The success of the Water Corporation’s mobile computing rollout (including Afaria) has been far greater than we had anticipated,” Mikkelsen says. “A like-for-like mobility replacement wouldn’t have had anywhere near the uptake in our organisation.”
Key drivers behind this success were Afaria’s ability to remotely push software upgrades and updates to mobile devices in the field, which means instant access to the latest features and functionalities of the mobile applications, even for workers in the remotest corner of rural Western Australia.
Additionally, Afaria Remote Control offers real-time remote control capability for Windows-based PCs and handheld devices, providing the option to interactively assist in delivering or reinforcing training and business process on the PDA to end-users on new applications, updates and upgrades or troubleshoot specific devices.
Using this capability, Water Corporation was able to reduce face-to-face training for new staff to just one day, with further training and ongoing support supplied using this feature. As a result, user engagement has significantly improved and the vast majority of field work orders are now being processed remotely through the mobile system, replacing manual processes. This in turn has led to better visibility of activities and events for field crew at the frontline of customer service delivery.
“With Afaria’s remote connectivity, we can minimise the impact on the end-user and deal with up to 99 per cent of failures remotely. This has instilled confidence in our field crews, who can now obtain assistance when required. This allows the integrity and timeliness of the data the field crews provide to be utilised by the Corporation to keep our customers better informed and provide better service,” says Mikkelsen. “The Sybase solution has enabled us to push two major and multiple minor upgrades of the Sky application to our mobile fleet. Afaria’s flexibility also allowed us to add a device asset management component as well.”
Moving forward, the Water Corporation intends to leverage its investment and migrate more applications to the mobile platform supported by Afaria. These include its Operational Data Storage System and a meter reading application.
Another project in the pipeline is customised application access. Having Afaria in place allows extension to additional applications and makes the devices cost-effective. “We can manage and support a whole range of applications across multiple device types,” says Mikkelsen. “We plan to push tailored application packages to each device, and then to take this one step further by activating individual user profiles for each worker supported by Afaria managing the device configuration.
“The Water Corporation is currently considering purchasing a number of other device types for management and office workers in our organisation,” he says. “These options can now confidently be considered as they previously presented a security and device management risk. We’re evaluating the role that Afaria could provide for this purpose.”
This article was first published in Inside SAP March/April 2011.
