The Australian Gas Light Company (AGL) was formed in Sydney in 1837. It supplied gas for the first public lighting of a street lamp in Sydney in 1841 and was the second company to list on the Australian Stock Exchange. Today AGL Energy Services offers a range of services that identify opportunities to improve customer’s systems, equipment performance, and production processes through onsite infrastructure design and maintenance, monitoring and analysis, and energy-related safety and compliance reporting.

AGL’s Energy Services division is responsible for the top 100 natural gas customers in southern and eastern Australia, which means servicing more than 850 sites with 24/7 coverage. Managing the multimillion dollar service business was a daunting process that was very dependent on paper forms for tracking jobs, procedures, and safety and environmental records for every customer.

AGL’s dedicated national service manager, Sean Murray, realized the efficiency bottlenecks of relying on text-based SMS call dispatch and burdening his service technicians with binder books full of forms for jobs, quotes, safety, and site surveys. Service technicians were required to document all job-related activity and readings on paper. Once the job was completed, all the paperwork was bundled up and delivered to headquarters in Sydney twice per week via the post office.

AGL’s administrative team was tasked with opening, sorting, and reading the job documentation so they could transcribe the information into the SAP invoicing system. “We have the best technicians in the market, but their handwriting is the worst,” Murray said. “They write like doctors.”

This deciphering process often required several days at the end of the month to verify and reconcile the accuracy of the job data before an invoice could be generated and mailed to the customer. The entire job-to-invoice process cycle typically took two weeks to complete, extending the number of days that sales were outstanding from 30 to more than 45 days.

Retriever’s mobile applications allow users to continue working even when out of network range. (Images courtesy of Retriever Communications)

Improvement for all stakeholders

AGL began the search for a field mobility system that would reduce or eliminate the paperwork; minimize data entry for invoicing; and improve productivity for the service technicians, administrators, management, and customers. Their research led them to Retriever Communications, a pioneer of field mobility solutions. Operating since 1996, with hundreds of mobility apps spread across 25 countries, Retriever has pioneered software as a service (SAAS) mobility solutions hosted in the Cloud worldwide.

Retriever is a mobile enterprise application platform for B2B, B2E, or B2C environments. Retriever’s software enables the development, deployment, and management of robust, secure, cross-platform, fully internationalized native mobile applications hosted in the Cloud. It will operate across any IP-based network, including the Internet, GSM, GPRS, 3G and 4G mobile networks, Wi-Fi, and corporate ethernets.

All Retriever applications are platform-agnostic and standards-based, facilitating ease of interoperability with mobile devices and platforms, customer corporate systems, and public services in the Cloud. Retriever’s project management team was able to focus on AGL’s process and workflow without worrying about engineering a one-off system. This meant faster implementations and roll-outs at a lower cost, avoiding the endless software implementations that many enterprises experience. AGL’s system was implemented and rolled out in fewer than 90 days.

Connecting AGL workers

AGL’s workers in the field are often in locations that have limited or no Wi-Fi signal, so their system needed to work offline. Retriever’s mobile applications are designed to work in an occasionally connected environment, allowing users to continue working even when out of contact with the Retriever service due to lack of network coverage. Retriever’s service uses a “store and forward” design, handling integration with customer corporate systems and optimized data synchronization with Retriever applications. AGL’s workers with remote service routes took advantage of the offline capability of the system because their work is queued until they come back into coverage, often at the end of the day as they head back towards town.

As AGL’s system was deployed to field service technicians, positive performance indicators were realized quickly. For example, safety and occupational procedures were included in the job flow, so the technicians benefitted from immediate awareness of any job hazards at the site and could even share this information with co-workers. Another benefit realized was in the area of problem resolution – if technicians ran into unique situations, they could quickly capture details and photos, then send the information to an engineer at headquarters for a resolution. This saved many hours of labor and greatly reduced return service trips. More importantly, service technicians were filling out job details as soon as work was complete, resulting in more accurate job data and parts tracking while liberating them from the drudgery of hand-writing reports at the end of the shift.

Optimized billing

The administrative team quickly realized productivity gains as well. First, job data were arriving electronically, often hourly as soon as jobs were completed. This was a huge time-saving feature compared to waiting for job data via the postal service. The administrators could immediately start the quality review process and no longer needed to decipher hand-written reports. Reentering job billing information into SAP was no longer required. The “job to invoicing” process was fully automated, saving AGL countless labor hours by eliminating data entry, and the billing cycle dropped from two weeks to two days. Customers can receive their job invoices quickly, which means a lower days/sales outstanding ratio for AGL.

Compliance for customers

The Retriever field solution also assists AGL’s customers in the area of environmental compliance and reporting. AGL performs combustion analysis on compressors and boilers, generating compliance reports for the Australian Environmental Protection Authority. These reports are sent to the customers in a PDF format, so the customer can share them with the regulators and meet all compliance reporting deadlines.

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