Over Labor Day weekend this year, massive wildfires ripped across Bastrop County’s parched terrain in Central Texas. The firestorm—feeding off a historic drought, high winds and boiling temperatures—would eventually burn 34,000 acres and destroy more than 1,500 structures.

The wildfire was a test of the region’s 14-county electric utility provider—the Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative (BEC). More than 200 miles of BEC’s electric lines fell inside the burn zone as well as thousands of its customers’ homes and businesses. And on that Sunday, while others across the United States were enjoying a BBQ in their backyards, BEC was forced to evacuate its headquarters—that structure was also in harm’s way.

There was no sense of panic. Execs and managers moved operations to BEC’s disaster-recovery control center that day. But there wasn’t a need to revert to old business procedures (say, paper-based ones with tons of phone calls) for dispatching crews, creating construction orders, replacing meters or providing emergency-response services: Bluebonnet Electric would lean on its mobile-data system that ties in directly to its SAP ECC 6.0 system, the technology centerpiece of the cooperative.

Bluebonnet lineman Jeffrey Bolding enters service work orders via the mobile laptop that’s installed in his vehicle. (Photo by Sarah Beal)

“We reverted to our alternate headquarters location and immediately the mobile data system was available for dispatching work orders,” says Rob Defee, IT project manager at BEC. “We never lost the system, SAP or the mobile data in the system.” It’s a good thing, too: BEC wouldn’t be able to return to its headquarters until nearly three weeks later after the Labor Day wildfires.

While much of the glitz of SAP’s enterprise mobility push has focused on iPhones and iPads—you’ve likely seen those colorful BusinessObjects charts splashed on the sleek devices—there’s much more to “business mobility” than just equipping Mahogany Row with analytics on iPhones. Bluebonnet Electric’s story demonstrates that.

It’s also about transforming end-to-end business procedures—from order entry to work completion and all the steps in between—to save time and resources, eliminate mistakes and say good-bye to manual, paper-based processes. And also provide a welcome safety net when disasters strike.

The “Big Bang” Theory

Bluebonnet Electric is one of the largest electric cooperatives in Texas, serving more than 82,000 meters and maintaining 11,000 miles of power lines spread across more than 3,800 square miles, according to the cooperative.

SAP is at its core: Bluebonnet Electric rolled out R/3 in 2005. Today, BEC is on ECC 6.0 with finance and HR modules, as well as SAP industry-specific apps (such as plant maintenance and work management), that link to other systems for outage management, geographic information and vehicle location, to name a few.

Bluebonnet’s approach to its 2005 R/3 rollout is illustrative to how it approached its mobile project just a couple years later. “We used the big-bang approach for R/3,” Defee says. “It took us 18 months. We just took everything out and replaced it 100 percent.”

That mindset, adds project coordinator Cheryl Dobos, is just part of BEC’s DNA. “Culturally,” she says, “we’ve never shied away from that [big-bang] approach.” The confident attitude would be tested again as Bluebonnet Electric went after its big mobilization project.

Going Mobile

Paper. Phone calls. Too many drivers at one location. More paper. Manual data entry. Delays in data processing. Errors. Lots more phone calls.

That was exactly what Bluebonnet Electric wanted to get rid of. Execs knew that a mobilized data system, tied directly into its SAP hub and utilized by administrative personnel and the front-line crews, could solve most, if not all, of those headaches. The overriding mission, according to Defee, was to achieve “real-time SAP integration.”

The BEC project team began gathering project requirements in 2007. The team identified 31 work-order types and processes that could benefit from mobilization and real-time data transfer. BEC wanted everything automated and integrated—outage orders created in its OMS should zip to SAP and the scheduling and dispatching system automatically; work orders generated in SAP would be sent instantaneously to the Dell laptops used by crew members in one of the 65 trucks in the field; crew members should be able to attach forms and pictures to SAP work orders and close them in the field; automated route-optimization would provide new efficiencies; and much more.

Bluebonnet eventually selected the Clevest Mobile Field Force system (an SAP partner), and was “go-live” on the project in May 2008. Even though BEC had grander aspirations for its rollout, the first phase of the project delivered just six new work-order types and processes.

“We had a pretty long list of scope and detail requirements,” Defee says. “I’d say we were overly optimistic that we could do all the things that we scoped out in a single phase of a project.”

That’s not to say Phase 1 didn’t go well. It did, say Defee and Dobos. “The interfaces worked seamlessly with SAP,” Dobos says. But there were plenty of lessons learned—and much more work to do.

Lessons Learned and Big Benefits

The BEC project team went after its mobile project with a “Big Bang” approach—a tactic that worked well, Defee says, with its R/3 implementation.

“We did think, ‘We’ve done a lot of projects here and done a lot of project management, that it would come right along,’” Defee says. “It turned out to be a lot harder to get all that automation—the work orders completed without any manual interaction and human intervention—so we’d have that total automation. It turned out to be a lot more difficult than we ever thought.”

Defee and Dobos’s advice, then, is to take a multiphase approach to your mobility plans: Go after the most commonly used order types (or processes or apps) and least complex ones first, Dobos says. (Defee adds that the 80-20 rule might also apply for many companies: 20 percent of orders constitute 80 percent of the volume.) Then go after the rest in subsequent phases.

The multiphase approach also worked well in this case, Dobos says, because BEC was changing major pieces of long-standing business processes. (During the training, BEC personnel used both paper and the new system at same time.) Adds Defee: “You have to start with the prime objectives of your scope and get those accomplished in an initial project phase—and then come back and add those nice to haves.”

Other potential speed bumps to watch out for included:

Cost Estimates. BEC did extensive RFPs and met with many integrators, but cost became a big factor. “We seriously underestimated the total cost of everything that we put in our requirements,” Defee notes.

Process Integration (PI) Middleware. BEC also had a bit of a wake-up call with Netweaver PI middleware: it required dedicated hardware and additional licenses, and PI programming expertise was scarce and expensive, Defee says.

The subsequent two phases of Bluebonnet Electric’s mobility rollouts have added 14 more work-order types—including a GIS interface as well as the ability for BEC’s trucks to generate work orders. In addition to laptops in the trucks, BEC personnel use a mobile handheld device for meter swap orders when changing out meters.

Benefits abound: more than 2,500 work orders are processed using new system each month; BEC realized an 80 percent to 90 percent reduction in radio traffic and telephone calls and a reduction in two full-time employees; costly errors are now caught and corrected as they occur; “red flags,” such as incorrect meter serial numbers or meter tampering, are identified from the mobile data; and there’s much faster closure of work orders and more timely information delivered to BEC’s members.

As to project returns or cost savings, BEC doesn’t offer hard numbers, only to say that the savings already have been “dramatic.” Besides the two full-time equivalent reductions, BEC says it expects additional manpower reductions and efficiency gains in the near future.

Project Validation

The business agility BEC displayed during the Labor Day wildfires, in part attributable to its mobile systems and processes, wasn’t a reason to celebrate—it was just another validation of the project’s success.

All told, 4,300 of its meters lost power as a result of the fire, according to BEC. Crews replaced 632 poles, 45 miles of line and worked 252 miles of right-of-way during the restoration process alone.

When asked how the day-to-day operations would have gone if Bluebonnet Electric didn’t have its mobile data systems to rely on, Defee says: “It would have slowed everything down, delayed communications and the completion of the work.” It would have meant a return to the paper and radio system—and those personnel who would have been free to help out in other ways would have been doing all those manual processes. Defee estimates that it reduced BEC’s restoration time by one to two weeks.

In addition, in the heat of the wildfires, BEC utilized the mobile system to create an automated, electronic form so that crews could capture key pieces of data out in the field.

“We probably didn’t say this [mobile system] saved the day,” Defee recalls, “but the fact that it was there in place and in use systemically, we recognized after the fact that it was a huge contributing factor.”

BEC’s IT project team can’t rest on its laurels, however. It’s commencing an SAP CRM implementation. And the next and last phase of the mobile rollout is here—due to deliver the final 11 new work orders.

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