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Out in the Field

South Jersey Gas Company improves customer service and productivity by wirelessly connecting its workers with the back office

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CUSTOMER: South Jersey Gas Company HEADQUARTERS: Folsom, N.J. BUSINESS: Natural gas utility company HARDWARE: An IBM System z 890 SOFTWARE: z/Web-Host from illustro Systems International LLC CHALLENGE: Improving communications between field personnel and the main office SOLUTION: Using z/Web-Host from illustro Systems International to create Web-like applications for offsite personnel

Bills aside, you have to love utility companies. They pump electricity, gas, telephone and cable into your house, largely without you even thinking about it. When you turn on the lights, the stove or the television, they just work.

One such organization is South Jersey Gas Company. Recently, using ruggedized laptops and illustro Systems International LLC’s z/Web-Host, it dramatically changed the way it conducts business, allowing field personnel to quickly get details on any jobs that were either scheduled beforehand or that came up during normal operations and then update the company’s IBM System z*-based back-office systems from the field.

Now that all of its field personnel are outfitted with wirelessly networked computers and use a Web interface, they’ve become much more productive and proactive, and the company’s customer service representatives can more readily respond to customer requests.

Tapping In

Established nearly 100 years ago, the Folsom, N.J.-based South Jersey Gas Company specializes in providing natural gas services to residential, commercial and industrial customers in seven South Jersey counties. Until a few years ago, according to Donald Dyson, the company’s manager of IT, “The gas business made up about 75 percent of the company. Now, the non-regulated businesses are contributing more like 40 percent to our bottom line.”

The South Jersey name, however, is most closely aligned with its core gas-services business, which includes two operating functions, street operations and utility operations. The former focuses on the natural-gas infrastructure, “maintaining the pipes in the ground,” Dyson says. The utility-operations business unit deals with hooking that infrastructure up to homes and businesses. “If you want service at your house, we’ll tap into the main line and hang a meter and a regulator on your house,” Dyson adds.

Supporting these regulated business units is an IBM System z 890 running a host of highly customized, homegrown applications, including the customer service billing system and the service order system, the latter of which is used to manage work orders for field personnel. South Jersey’s customer service center uses these applications daily to address billing complaints and budgeting and to schedule appointments. An auxiliary dispatching application matches customer locations and work requests with field personnel based on geography and skill sets.

In the past, utility operations field personnel would hook a proprietary field tablet computer to docking stations at their divisional hubs, uploading that day’s work orders. They would then go out into the field based on those work orders and complete individual jobs. As new jobs came in, they were notified either via packet uploads to the tablets or by radio. Unfortunately, the wireless connections between the tablets and the company’s backend servers were tenuous at best, and if the field personnel were contacted by radio, they would then have to enter the details of those jobs in the form of obscure codes into the tablets and dock them at the hubs at the end of the day. Any information added to those tablets would then be uploaded to the z890—or its predecessor mainframes—and processed through its COBOL-based applications.

This method of updating the mainframe meant delays between when work was completed and when it was reported. Because of this, the company’s customer service representatives (CSRs) wouldn’t have access to pertinent information until the next day. As a result, customers who called South Jersey would often receive only generalized information—for example, that a truck was dispatched but not when it might arrive. That data wouldn’t be available to the CSRs until after the tablets had been synced with the mainframe at the end of a shift.

Additionally, if there were any upgrades to the tablets, someone would have to physically apply them. It couldn’t be done over the spotty network the tablets ran on or via the docks. “We’d have to go out and touch every one of those tablets or have everyone come in so we could upgrade them,” Dyson recalls. “There wasn’t an easy way to push the upgrades to them.”

There was a similar disconnect with street operations personnel. To help keep the company on top of budgets and field performance, these workers would have to write out time sheets and report materials spent on specific assignments. They would then return to the office and turn them over to divisional supervisors for corrections and approvals, then forward them to data-entry personnel to populate the mainframe, resulting in a time-consuming process.

“DFSMSrmm is very reliable, and it’s 100-percent supported by IBM.” —Eric Breuer, manager, large systems, Baldor Electric

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