Louisville benefits from utility's digital transformation programme

Kentucky’s largest public water provider, Louisville Water Company, has announced the completion of its digital transformation efforts, creating a “single face of work” for all field and asset management functions.

The end goal was to deliver a better, more connected experience for its customers.

Streamline operations

Louisville Water embarked on a multi-phased, digital transformation project to streamline operations and boost efficiencies using KloudGin’s combined field service and asset management solution. The KloudGin solution replaced systems that were 30 years old, mostly paper driven and required multiple manual operations.

Additionally, there was no mobile capacity for employees to communicate and record their work while in the field.

“Digital transformation is helping us maximise our scheduling, asset reliability and uptime, reduce capital and operational expenditures, extend asset life, reduce unplanned downtime and provide superior customer service – all without increasing operational-, safety- or environmental risks,” said Dave Vogel, executive vice president, Louisville Water Company.

“KloudGin has a deep understanding of how to effectively deploy mobile field asset management for seamless adoption and [its] team has extensive experience servicing the utility industry. We have a billion dollars’ worth of assets to manage and KloudGin has allowed us to make informed decisions, so we are able to evaluate and extend the useful life of our assets.”

“It’s not just about capturing work efficiencies but examining how we spend resources and replace assets that are at the end of their life cycle”

Using KloudGin’s platform, Louisville Water is able to:

• manage all work on the same platform with a single mobile interface for all field resources
• eliminate paper trails and optimise labour and inventory
• schedule employees and work orders more effectively, with progress tracking for future benchmarking automate timekeeping and approval process
• prioritise work orders by both system criticality and work order criticality
• allow field crews to update work activity with exact location of repairs via Esri GIS integration
• implement a single sign-on (SSO) that allows crews to use existing network usernames and passwords – making their jobs easier.

“Our mission with this project was ‘doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time,’ along with a goal of achieving operational efficiency,” said James Bates, director of infrastructure planning and records, Louisville Water Company.

“It’s not just about capturing work efficiencies but examining how we spend resources and replace assets that are at the end of their life cycle. KloudGin and WAM (work asset management) are providing us with crucial data, which has led us to greater operational efficiency and effectiveness.”

Water quality

Louisville Water Company began operations in October 1860 as Kentucky’s first public water utility and today delivers an average of 120 million gallons of drinking water to nearly one million people in Louisville Metro and surrounding counties. It claims it is the only utility to trademark tap water and its treatment plants are ranked as two of the top 18 in North America for outstanding water quality.

KloudGin is a combined one-cloud industry-focused field service and asset management solution that automates work management processes, enables customer self-service, with the aim of increasing worker productivity.

You might also like:

• Analytics tool aims to track down water meter inaccuracies
• Miami-Dade County deploys advanced wastewater solution
• New company aims to bring intelligent approach to water