Utility companies are among the most integral and essential components of our society. However, most of us take electricity for granted, making it easy to overlook the unique challenges the industry faces every day to keep the lights on.

Fortunately, with nearly 3000 utility companies in the US, there are some time-tested strategies for managing daily operations. Let’s talk about how workflow automation can help improve your utility company today.

Manage Scheduled Calls and Maintenance

Scheduling is an essential aspect of any business, but it poses particular challenges for utility companies. Not only do you have to plan ahead and schedule routine maintenance, but you also need to adapt your schedule frequently to handle unexpected calls. Severe weather events, damaged equipment, or other disasters can force tight schedules to change at a moment’s notice.

Fortunately, workflow automation can help you quickly alter and adapt your company’s schedule. This can work across multiple users and platforms, allowing you and your employees to make changes whenever necessary. With the right tools, you can even program your workflow solutions to adapt automatically to changes and help determine appropriate solutions for you.

Reduce Errors

Machines don’t make mistakes, humans do. These errors won’t only cost trillions of dollars in the global economy each year, but they can pose many safety risks, especially in the utility industry.

When programmed correctly, your workflow automation can dramatically reduce (or eliminate) errors with data entry, archival, and so much more.

Automate Archival

Businesses need to track their sensitive data. Whether you’re logging maintenance or adding new customer data, secure archival and backup storage is essential.

With the right workflow automation, you won’t have to worry about archiving your sensitive data. Otherwise, you could find yourself in financial or even legal jeopardy.

For example, when a new customer fills out a form online, you could be held legally responsible if a breach results in the compromise of that data. Customer addresses, payment methods, and even social security numbers need serious protection.

Therefore, the right workflow automation should include cloud-based storage, multi-factor authentication, and automatic archival for the best results. This way, you can access your archived data from anywhere without having to worry about security or failing to back up your data on time.

Increase Efficiency For Field Members

Studies show that 10% of SMBs spend over $50,000 a year on wasted time due to inefficiencies. Right now, many businesses are catching on to similar challenges of remote work. However, utility companies have been forced to find solutions to this for years, as field members work in different locations with different challenges every day.

Unfortunately, this comes with a lot of inefficiencies. If workers are unable to communicate, input essential data, or access the data they need, this creates plenty of time loss, which can add up to serious financial losses throughout the company.

However, with the right systems in place, you can easily integrate field workers into your in-house system, regardless of how many platforms, networks, users, or tenants it requires. With the right multitenant workflow, all of your customers, clients, and employees can share the same computational resources, integrating all of your valuable data into one convenient platform.

Business Analysis and Reporting

When a system handles such vast amounts of data, there’s no sense in trying to analyze it all yourself. Full-time accountants are expensive enough, but most utility companies would need a team of accountants to manage such a large database.

Well, that’s where automation comes in. Customers come, go, and move all the time, infrastructure breaks and requires investment, demand changes over time. All of this affects your company’s bottom line in unpredictable ways.

Therefore, utility companies need automation that can analyze and report on the most essential metrics for your business. Over time, this will allow you to make sound decisions for your business, comply with local government requests, maintain customer and client relations, and offer detailed reporting to shareholders. If you’re imploring a business-wide workflow solution, make sure it offers business analysis!

Use Workflow Automation For Your Utility Company

Workflow automation can offer a lot of benefits to any enterprise, but it’s uniquely beneficial to utility companies. Utilities require frequent adaptations, vast amounts of data, and multiple users working in constantly varying locations. Therefore, utilities need a flexible, scalable, and programmable workflow solution for the best results.

Read our blog for more tips about managing your workflow, and see the list of features our workflow automation offers to learn more!