Ausgrid faced fragmented systems for planning and dispatching work, leading to inefficiencies and lack of real-time updates for field crews.
By integrating Dynamics 365 Field Service with their existing systems, Ausgrid automated scheduling, improved resource management, and enhanced mobile capabilities for field workers.
The integration provided a unified view of jobs and customers, increased productivity, and improved customer service through real-time updates and accurate scheduling.
Ausgrid is an Australian electricity distributor that builds, maintains, and operates a large and growing electricity distribution network on the east coast of the country.
Because it needed to automate manual processes and give its field workers more effective technology tools, Ausgrid integrated Dynamics 365 Field Service with the company’s existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment. With this unified solution, Ausgrid has a single view of all jobs and resources, increased productivity and efficiency for field technicians through manual task automation, and improved customer service through a 360-degree view of resource availability and job status.
“Dynamics 365 integrates seamlessly with our enterprise applications to provide an integrated workflow from our asset management platforms to Field Service and then back into asset management and our timesheet systems.”
Peter Rigney, Head of Data and Analytics, Ausgrid
Workers self-assign 1,000-plus tasks, boosting productivity
As the largest distributor of electricity in Australia, Ausgrid provides power to 1.8 million customers. The company’s network, made up of substations, powerlines, underground cables, and power poles, spans 22,275 square kilometers throughout Sydney, the Central Coast, and the Hunter Valley.
For many years, Ausgrid relied on four separate systems to support the planning, scheduling, and dispatch of planned and unplanned work. Planned work includes project work, maintenance, and customer-initiated jobs, while unplanned work includes emergency responses to storms, floods, and other events that can impact the network. The company’s fragmented systems included a mix of standalone databases with limited integration into enterprise applications, making it difficult for Ausgrid to keep track of work and provide timely and accurate information to customers. “We had disconnected and isolated systems for planned and unplanned work, which meant we didn’t have enough visibility into our resource assignments. We sometimes had people assigned different tasks in each system, so someone could be assigned two tasks at the same time,” says Joanne Lewis, Ausgrid’s Product Owner for the Field Service solution. Additionally, employees depended on isolated apps to collect data and manual processes to fill out daily timesheets.
Ausgrid also needed to enhance mobile capabilities for field crews, who had no access to real-time status updates for scheduled jobs. “Short notice changes to the schedule were made off system, so field employees didn’t receive updates about their next appointments while working remotely,” Lewis says. As a result, work was not always scheduled on time when customers reserved appointments through the website or by phone, because engineers were not always available. Field engineers also lacked visibility into what other work was available if a job was cancelled or they finished a scheduled job early. “The only option was to call a supervisor to get assigned more work,” says Lewis. “However, if the supervisor was driving or unavailable, there was no new work assigned so there was a lot of downtime for field employees.”
To more effectively manage resources on the ground, automate manual tasks, and improve customer communications, Ausgrid sought a new technology solution.
Ausgrid was using Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help contact center employees manage customer interactions, and it chose to expand its Dynamics 365 environment by implementing Field Service to manage onsite service operations and automate appointment scheduling and resource dispatching. Dynamics 365 integrates with the company’s SAP, Kronos, and Primavera business systems. Microsoft partner Velrada assisted during the implementation, providing architecture, configuration, and deployment expertise.
More than 1,400 Ausgrid field workers now use Field Service to manage planned and unplanned work. Users include overhead and underground workers, substation technicians, rescue services staff, network operations workers, contract resources, and emergency service operators. “Dynamics 365 integrates seamlessly with our enterprise applications to provide an integrated workflow from our asset management platforms to Field Service and then back into asset management and our timesheet systems,” says Peter Rigney, Head of Data and Analytics. “Field Service also gives our field crews centralized, easy access to scheduling and dispatch information and updated information on customers. Field crews can also use the solution to see all work nearby and assign it to themselves as needed.” The solution is used throughout the company’s operations, with around 10,000 work orders completed each month across capital projects, maintenance, customer, and fault and emergency work, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Ausgrid also integrated its Azure-based reporting platform with Dynamics 365. “We have very rich data coming out of Dynamics 365, which flows into our enterprise reporting and analytics environment to give us better decision-making capabilities,” says Rigney.
With Dynamics 365, Ausgrid has a standardized solution for managing work and resources across its network area, making it faster and easier for the company to facilitate both planned and unplanned work. “Dynamics 365 gives us a single view of all our work and all our teams in the field, so we can more easily manage tasks such as scheduling and dispatching workers,” says Will Hozack, Senior Emergency Services Officer. This capability helps the company more accurately and reliably forecast demand to ensure the necessary capacity can be provided at any time.
Additionally, the integration between Field Service and Customer Service gives Ausgrid customer service representatives better visibility into job status. “Now, if a customer loses power and calls us to find out why it hasn’t been restored yet, one of our customer service employees can look in the system and see that a resource has been assigned and a crew is on the way and then communicate the ETA to the customer,” says Hozack. “We didn’t have that kind of real-time visibility before.”
“Dynamics 365 gives us a single view of all our work and all our teams in the field, so we can more easily manage tasks such as scheduling and dispatching workers.”
Will Hozack, Senior Emergency Services Officer, Ausgrid
Ausgrid field technicians are more productive because of the new solution’s mobile capabilities. For planned work, field workers receive notifications through a mobile app and can quickly check their calendar to see their upcoming appointments. For urgent unplanned work or emergencies, technicians also receive a text message with the work details. With better visibility into scheduling information, field workers can self-assign work as needed. “If field workers finish a job sooner than expected or there’s a cancellation, they can access the mobile app in Dynamics 365 Field Service and quickly see if there’s another job nearby and then assign themselves that job,” says Matt Huby, Senior Portfolio Manager. “This minimizes their downtime due to cancellations, which is better for our customers and our business.” On average, field workers use the solution to self-assign additional tasks more than 1,000 times a month.
With these capabilities, Ausgrid staff in charge of scheduling and dispatching can avoid scenarios where field technicians are double-booked for work. As a result, appointments offered by the system to customers can be reliably fulfilled when work is scheduled to field crews on the day of dispatch. “Previously, schedulers looking to dispatch an urgent unplanned job couldn’t see what planned work field technicians were assigned to, so they couldn’t prioritize. That sometimes led to high-priority jobs being cancelled unwittingly because there wasn’t an easy way to look across systems to see scheduling information,” Huby says. “We then had to wait weeks to reschedule the cancelled job, which had an impact on productivity and efficiency. Now, instead of taking weeks to re-plan that work, we can avoid the problem, which leads to more productivity for our field workers and no broken promises to customers.”
“If field workers finish a job sooner than expected or there’s a cancellation, they can access the mobile app in Dynamics 365 Field Service and quickly see if there’s another job nearby and then assign themselves that job. This minimizes their downtime due to cancellations, which is better for our customers and our business.”
Matt Huby, Senior Portfolio Manager, Ausgrid
With the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Customer Service, Ausgrid has a more complete view of its customers, from current issues to historical data. Field technicians can view customer comments, as well as comments from Ausgrid’s customer service representatives, providing them with greater visibility into the job. “By searching previous conversations, field technicians can see whether a customer or someone on the same street has had a similar problem in the past,” says Will Hozack, Senior Emergency Service Officer. “A technician might approach a job differently with the knowledge that a customer has made other calls before or is reporting a problem for the first time.”
Ausgrid has removed many of its manual tasks by automating processes in Dynamics 365. For example, field technicians previously had to manually enter a 14-digit job code into their timesheet for each job on a mobile device, which caused frustration and sometimes led to inaccurate cost capture. With Field Service, the job codes and work status are pre-populated in timesheets. “Because Dynamics 365 Field Service automates timesheet capture processes, it reduces the effort for field workers and also leads to much greater accuracy for time worked,” says Nathan Ormerod, Field Supervisor. “From an asset management perspective, that means we have greater visibility into the cost of a particular task, whether it’s a maintenance or replacement task. That supports better decisions about when to replace aging assets”
Field technicians also no longer need to manually upload photos or documents into different systems. “Dynamics 365 Field Service gives us integrated data capture features, so if a customer submits a photo of a problem, or worker takes a photo at a job site, it automatically goes into a central repository, it’s linked to the job and the location is tagged,” Ormerod says. “That means field crews can quickly see the photo and know what to look out for when they get to the customer location.”
“Because Dynamics 365 Field Service automates timesheet capture processes, it reduces the effort for field workers and also leads to much greater accuracy for time worked.”
Nathan Ormerod, Field Supervisor, Ausgrid
As the next step in its Dynamics 365 journey, Ausgrid will extend the solution footprint across additional regions and transition existing Power Apps to the same production environment. “We’re also focusing on increasing schedule optimization so we can get more work done,” says Peter Rigney.
Ausgrid is also exploring the use of Microsoft Copilot to automate scheduling tasks. “We’re interested in developing agent-based scheduling to reduce some of the time and effort required to schedule and reschedule work,” Rigney says. “Overall, when it comes to AI, we’re interested in the capabilities that are available from AI assistance, and we look forward to working with Microsoft to explore that further.”
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