Know the Risk Score Before You Dig

Not all dig tickets are the same. Whether you’re dealing with a few hundred or a few hundred thousand tickets per year, you need to prioritize and automate responses to high-risk activities over your most critical assets. Even though many organizations already understand their infrastructure and proactively monitor activities taking place near their high-profile assets, they continue to identify gaps in their process. These gaps result in damages or near misses. Utilizing SmartScore, clients develop risk profiles and take them directly to the field. There’s no need to wait on someone to set up an artificial intelligence engine when you know the activities, excavators and areas which are causing the most damage to your facilities. Automating notifications and creating and scheduling tasks are just the beginning of what UtiliSphere™ can do to address these risky activities.

When Consumers Energy, one of the largest gas and electric companies in the Midwest, began using SmartScore to identify and prioritize the most high-risk tickets, they immediately increased productivity by turning a manual process into an automated one. Consumers Energy also uses SmartScore to direct more experienced techs to handle tickets with the highest risk score, such as cross-bore tickets. With UtiliSphere, they also reduced damages.

“The field team uses UtiliSphere to plan their day — every single day. Field workers can get into UtiliSphere from their phone, putting real-time information into the system. Everyone immediately knows what’s going on in the field,” said Amanda Brott, Senior Technology Analyst, Consumers Energy.