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The challenge
Reducing complexity and automating processes
High Energy Service (HES) delivers critical high voltage maintenance, safety and compliance programs to industrial clients across Australia. Scheduling its staff to deliver services to clients across various sites and requirements around the country can be a demanding process, and very few people in the business had the knowledge to perform the task.
“Our work is particularly dangerous, so we really need to make sure we send the right person out to do the right kind of work. We have direct access to the electrical grid for a lot of work. Doing the wrong thing can cause massive disruption or it can hurt people. It’s essential that the right people are assigned to the right jobs.”
Ashlee Annear, Operations Coordinator, HES
The existing scheduling process was highly manual to perform. Spread across multiple spreadsheets, expertise to perform the task was held largely in the knowledge of key team members. Should they depart the company there could be significant risk to effective ongoing schedule management in the absence of a smarter solution.
With safety as its highest priority, scheduling also aims to account for managing fatigue risks across the HES team. Under its spreadsheet-based process this was also largely manual. A lot of checks and cross checks were needed which created additional risks that a more advanced scheduling system could better manage.
“You needed to look back at weeks of data and interpret that from the reports,” says Annear. “Taking account of multiple factors just wasn’t efficient. If we could build something that looked at all the factors it would make things a lot easier for our scheduling.”
With the business continuing to expand its offerings to more clients, HES expected to onboard a lot of new technicians with short notice. By moving to a new scheduling platform that incorporated skills-based job assignments, HES would ensure it could continue to scale effectively while maintaining client satisfaction and reducing safety risks.
The approach
Insights through “discovery first”
HES and Telstra Purple came together to investigate the companies needs and ideal outcomes through a three-week “discovery first” investigation. Through a brainstorming session with key members of the management team and admin staff, Telstra Purple identified some priorities that could be a focus of an MVP project to deliver fast value to the HES scheduling process.
“The Telstra Purple team extrapolated our needs from some very stream of consciousness discussions,” says Annear. “It was a really impressive engagement the way they were able to come back to us with such a clear understanding of what we wanted.”
With a focus on shifting a manual process toward something more efficient, the Telstra Purple team worked with the HES experts to audit the existing systems and understand what data sources would need to come together to make scheduling a single tool process for staff. Under the old process, data was not available with any immediacy for the scheduler. Designing a process that automates data gathering for easy reference was a high priority.
The solution
A single platform to leverage the power of data insights
The investigation process led to the selection of Microsoft Power BI as the ideal advanced reporting platform for the new HES scheduling report. With the company already working with Microsoft tools, consolidating data into the Power platform offered the most comfortable path for the company’s future.
“We had heard of Power BI but we did not understand its capabilities. After Telstra Purple showed us how it could just pull the right data in to create what we needed we were pretty quickly set on it as the path forward.”
Ashlee Annear, Operations Coordinator, HES
With the move to Power BI, it also marked a shift away from a structure based on local documents and into a cloud software approach. The previous setup required accessing files on a local server at the HES office over a VPN, making remote access a particularly poor experience. The new approach makes a highly performant version of the scheduler, available from anywhere over any internet connection, and backed by the security of Microsoft Authentication.
To connect the disparate data sources together, Telstra Purple investigated the state of the data in its existing formats and how best to bring it all together. For HES, they discovered they could use two APIs to deliver the connective tissue needed to avoid a manual export process with potential for errors such as duplication. This made it easy to automate the consolidation of data and ensure that roles like electricians that appeared across multiple data sources could be accurately unified and validated.
The new centralisation of data into Power BI also sets the groundwork for further opportunities for delivering insights to the HES leadership team. While the previous setup saw data buried in complex spreadsheets, the new approach creates a more accessible environment for staff with appropriate access privileges to see reports and gain deeper insights for business decision making.
The impact
Increased efficiency with automated processes
With the new scheduling system in place, HES has seen the efficiency of the new system provide great comfort to the team. It offers easier processes that are accessible to more team members, improving the company’s confidence in how the system will scale with its ongoing growth targets.
The new process makes it easy for alternate staff members to access and perform work assignments using clearly identifiable skill-based information. Technicians now have detailed profiles of their specific skills and experience to ensure they will be appropriately assigned to jobs in the field without the scheduler needing to remember who they are based on personal details.
“This will be a massive time saver when other team members need to cover our main scheduler. When she goes on leave, they can get the job done without needing all her team knowledge in mind,”
Ashlee Annear, Operations Coordinator, HES
The new tools also offer automated alerts on low, medium, and high fatigue risks to enable easy assessment of this critical safety insight. This is based on a calculation drawn from the period worked by every individual over recent days and weeks. It does not automatically exclude anyone from availability but shows the scheduler who may need a fatigue assessment before being assigned to more work.
“Our focus is always to provide the best and safest service to our customers,” says Annear. “Telstra Purple has given us the system that sets us up to improve our efficiency even as we scale operations into the future.”
ABOUT HIGH ENERGY SERVICES
Founded in 2007 to service the Western Australian mining industry, High Energy Service has become an industry leader for high voltage design, installation, and maintenance.
The company offers specialist electrical technicians to businesses across Australia to keep energy intensive industries operating at peak efficiency with little to no downtime.
Learn more about Telstra Solutions
- Telstra Purple Consulting Services Telstra Purple Consulting, Professional and Managed Services
