One control tower for a utility's field operations

The challenge

Our client keeps the lights and water running across a large region — and until recently, they ran that field operation half-blind. Faults came in by phone. Crews were dispatched from a whiteboard and a spreadsheet. Asset history sat in one system, work orders in another, and the crews’ own updates came back over radio to be typed in later, if at all. When a supervisor was asked “where are we on that outage?”, the honest answer was often “let me find out.”

The cost wasn’t only slow response. It was repeat visits because a crew arrived without the right part or the asset’s history, overtime spent reconciling what actually happened, and a control room making decisions on a picture that was always an hour or two out of date.

The approach

We didn’t start with software. We spent time in the control room and in the field, mapping how a fault actually travels from report to resolution, and where the picture went dark. That grounding — the same instinct we bring from oil, gas and mining — shaped everything: the tool had to work for a dispatcher under pressure and a technician in the rain, not just look good in a demo.

• We built a single live view of faults, crews, jobs and assets — one screen the control room trusts, updating as events happen rather than after the shift.
• We put the field in the loop with a mobile app that works offline: crews see the job, the asset and its history, and log what they did once, at the point of work, syncing cleanly when a signal returns.
• We connected what they already ran — asset management, work orders and outage systems — through proper integrations, so the control tower reflected one reconciled truth instead of three arguing versions.

The impact

With a live picture replacing the phone-and-whiteboard scramble, fault response time fell by roughly a third, and the share of jobs completed on the first visit rose because crews arrived prepared. The manual effort of dispatching and reconciling — hours every shift — largely disappeared. Most tellingly, the control room stopped guessing: “where are we?” became a glance, not an investigation.

We continue to run and extend the platform as the operation grows into new regions.