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Incident Communication System

EDP uses mBPM^TM to reduce incident response time by effectively managing communication with technical field teams.

EDP, Energias de Portugal

EDP is one of the largest European players in the electric sector, and one of the biggest groups in Portugal. The Group's activities are focused on electric power production and distribution, telecommunications and information technologies, although having interests in other business areas like Water, Gas and Engineering.

EDP has more than 14.500 employees, and achieved a net profit of 1.071 Million Euro in 2005. EDP is a listed company in Euronext Lisbon and NYSE.

The Challenge

EDP's Call Center is available 24x7 for receiving customer calls reporting electrical problems. When a call is received, its information is entered into a management system, that keeps track of it until its solved and the customer is properly served.

Within this context, and in order to react promptly to all network incidents, EDP has hundreds of technical teams available on the field, managed by geographical service centers. Communication between service centers and field teams relayed on voice using the technicians' cell phones. EDP felt that the overall process could gain efficiency by using wireless data services to communicate with the field teams and mobile applications to support their activity, since it would free back-office personnel for other activities, improve communication accuracy, and increase field teams' response efficiency.

The Solution

Using the mBPM^TM Platform, EDP and TEKEVER were able to create and deploy a cutomized Field Force Automation system in less than two months. Being fully integrated with the existing systems, the SCI (Incident Communication System) provides a web-based back-office that allows dispatchers to manage each team's availability, assign new service orders and manage the entire service life cycle, while keeping constant track of critical business KPIs.

Using the Web, SMS and Java Mobile channels of mBPM^TM, the solution was deployed with using regular java-enabled mobile phones. Using the GSM/GPRS network, the solution provides a seamless communication experience to back-office and field workers, allowing them to completely rely on the SCI to manage incidents and attend to customer's demands with more efficiency.

SCI, J2ME Channel

SCI, Back-Office