Dynamic forms

Stadtwerke Dresden thus supplies around 300,000 customers in Dresden and the surrounding area with electricity, natural gas, drinking water and district heating. 124 fitters and 37 dispatchers are responsible for maintaining the networks.

Until 2013, the scheduling of maintenance orders was carried out using a scheduling tool developed in-house. The fitters received their orders for the day in the morning from their respective foreman at the branch. Only then could they set off alone or in teams and begin processing their orders.

They filled out the feedback on completed orders on paper. The office staff then checked these reports and entered them electronically for further processing.

In 2011, Drewag decided to introduce a field service management system in order to make the scheduling and order processing of fitters more efficient and to avoid media disruptions.

Various providers and solutions were evaluated in a tender process. A key criterion was the ability to integrate with the backend systems SAP PM and various resource information systems based on Oracle.

The choice ultimately fell on MobileX-Dispatch, the field service management system for scheduling mobile resources, and MIP for Field Service, the mobile solution for order processing by fitters on site.

In 2013, the two solutions for the gas, water, district heating and electricity sectors were introduced at Drewag in an initial expansion phase. This was followed by step-by-step implementation for the individual business processes over several expansion stages.

The dispatchers plan the maintenance and repair orders for the fitters about two weeks in advance. To do this, they use a wizard in MobileX-Dispatch as a template generator for creating the operations of SAP PM collective orders.

The templates are structured according to divisions, activity groups and activities. The dispatchers select default values for the activities from a list. This shortens the input process and ensures correct assignment to the collective orders.

The fitters now receive their orders directly on their mobile device. This gives them offline access to all relevant information such as the plant structure, object data, operation history and messages in SAP PM and the backend system SIS. It is also possible to jump to an offline GIS.

MIP for Field Service

In MIP for Field Service, the fitter records the system status on site. Data such as measurement documents are checked directly for plausibility as they are entered. The check criteria are transferred from SAP PM to the mobile device and used during data entry.

MIP for Field Service transmits the feedback on the orders and daily reports directly to the backend systems. This eliminates the time-consuming manual transfer of data from paper documents.

Another major productivity advance occurred in 2016 with the introduction of dynamic forms - an add-on module of MIP for Field Service for digitizing paper forms.

For mass processes such as the inspection of gas or water valves, hydrants or substations, fitters previously had to fill out various paper forms. This resulted in a total of around 38,000 documents per year. Just filling out these forms and manually transferring the data to the backend systems took a total of 424 working days.

With the help of MIP's dynamic forms, these paper forms were digitized centrally and rolled out to the fitters. This allows them to fill them out directly on their mobile devices.

After they have completed the job, the transfer takes place both structured as a data record and unstructured as a PDF into the backend system. The migration to version 5.0 of the Field Service Management Suite is planned for the near future, which will also include some enhancements in the dynamic forms.

Read access to the entire standard data model means that practically any data from MIP for Field Service can be used to centrally create customer-specific forms with their own data entry dialogs, roll them out automatically, and trigger customer-specific processes.