Australian Water Utility Firm Enables Field Workers to be Highly Productive with Volt MX

How to Find and Fix Equipment — Fast!

This Australian-based utility firm provides fresh water, wastewater, and drainage services throughout western Australia. For years they have relied on their legacy systems to manage and maintain functionality for more than 1,000 mobile devices in the field. Over time, these outdated systems stopped working on the newer mobile devices and operating systems that their field workers were using.

This problem became increasingly difficult as more and more older devices began to fail and replacing them became harder and harder to do (they had even resorted to searching on eBay in attempts to find them!). Customers began to experience interruptions in service.

They explored low-code application development solution options that would allow them to build a solution for the problem. Because of its ability to use a single code base and deploy on any device, HCL Volt MX beat out the competition. Because of Volt MX, the organization was also able to build an app for all their field workers — quickly.

Access to Crucial Data for Field Workers

Not only did Volt MX have the “build for any device” capability, it also was able integrate with their backend SAP system so the company could still access years of business data.

Providing real-time and immediate access to the SAP data repository is crucial for field workers to conduct their day-to-day work. Because of this functionality, workers are able to identify and fix broken pipes, read water meters, perform asset inspections in various locations, capture photos of equipment and materials, and upload them for detailed analysis.

The Volt MX app also gives them access to procedural documentation to help address how-to questions in the field. Simply put, the SAP integration offers superior connectivity to the data they need — a solution competitors simply couldn’t offer.

Also, the app integrated with their geographical information system (GIS), giving them extremely granular information on device location and fault recording.

A Strategy for Continuous Improvement

Accurate and timely asset fault information and remediation provided by the Volt MX app has increased overall productivity and efficiencies in the field workers’ daily work. And the accuracy and integrity fostered by secure and reliable data access and transfer capabilities built into the app is allowing them to achieve government regulated key performance indicators (KPI) compliance.

The IT team is happy, thanks to Volt MX, because they can easily and affordably replace faulty devices, since the app works anywhere. This has resulted in massive cost savings!