City West Water's Implementation of Viryanet Product "Goes Live"

City West Water (CWW) is one of three retail water businesses located in metropolitan Melbourne and owned by the Victorian Government. CWW provides drinking water, sewerage, trade waste, and recycled water services to approximately 276,000 residential and 31,300 non-residential (industrial and commercial) customers in Melbourne's Central Business District and the inner and western suburbs.

The ViryaNet mobile workforce management went live recently, automating approximately 100 CWW technicians who respond to reactive, scheduled, and SCADA jobs over a vast geographical area. For each of these job types, the ViryaNet product dispatches a crew with the appropriate skill mix, and presents the dispatcher with a geospatial view of locations of the job, the crew, and the CWW asset. Crews perform work and, through their field devices, provide updated information, including job status, asset details, condition reports, and resource utilization back to the dispatch. When field work is complete, the ViryaNet product routes the service request for review, action, and closure. For this implementation, the ViryaNet product was integrated with asset management, GIS, and SCADA systems.

With the ViryaNet product, CWW has improved the operational performance of its crews, including efficiently dispatching field technicians and resources to various job assignments. In addition, the ViryaNet product has expedited work orders, and has provided real-time updates of job progress in the office and field, thus, improving organizational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and job morale.

The ViryaNet product is a complete workforce management solution, and includes functionality for call taking, scheduling and dispatch, case management, workflow, field-based GIS support, in-field data collection, and powerful integration software.

Managing Director of City West Water Anne Barker was impressed with the innovation of the ViryaNet product, commenting that the new system contributes to the overall efficiency of the business. "City West Water constantly seeks ways to improve itself - through the optimization of processes and deployment of technology - so that we may better serve our customers. "I am delighted with the benefits that we have received already from the implementation of the ViryaNet product."

"City West Water is a leader in the field - a visionary organization, respectful of the environment, caring for their customers, and conscious of sound business practices. They seek continual improvement, and, as such, are using technology and best practices to meet the needs of their customers, improve operational performance, build market share, and increase profits," stated Jeffrey Oskin, COO, ViryaNet. "Putting the ViryaNet product into operation is a significant step for CWW constituents and for us as their partner."