When a customer has a gas or electricity emergency, primary response time is critical; faster is always better. A midwest utility company wanted to improve its emergency response times and rank in the top quartile based on national response averages.

Its past process involved a series of disconnected and manual steps: identify the emergency address, search for the closest technician, call and confirm the tech’s availability, then create the emergency work order. After the emergency had been “made safe,” there was a data review and cleanup to ensure time stamps for each response step were correctly captured.

The company worked with TIBCO Gold partner Behaim IT Solutions and used the Behaim Emergency Response Application (ERA), built on TIBCO technologies. ERA leverages TIBCO’s real-time architecture and the latest smartphone capabilities to save critical minutes.

Now, once the emergency address is identified in Dispatch (the application software that the call center uses to log the emergency call from the customer), the ERA mobile application instantly finds the closest available technician and sends a message to their smartphone. The technician simply accepts the work order and immediately begins the primary response. As soon as they start driving, the “on route” time stamp is automatically captured by the device’s GPS.

While driving, the tech receives audible turn-by-turn driving directions, and once they arrive at the location, the “on site” time stamp is automatically captured. The technician can focus on making the environment safe, and when they have done so, they simply press a button on their mobile device, and the time stamp for “made safe” is automatically captured.

Behind the scenes, the ERA app automatically generates and updates an emergency response work order with a complete history of the incident and all time stamps. The solution makes regulatory reporting much easier.

By automating 80-90 percent of the controllable process time – that is, the time it takes to receive the call from the customer and get an emergency responder dispatched in their truck – TIBCO integration and event-driven capabilities combined with Behaim’s ERA app helped this midwestern utility achieve significantly reduced emergency response time. All transactions required by back-end systems are executed automatically, and technicians never have to stop to open a laptop or tablet. It’s now much easier for them to focus on their primary purpose, to make customers safe. The ERA app also ensures critical regulatory reporting with accurate data.

According to Josef Fischer, CEO at Behaim ITS, “ERA’s challenge was to make a mission critical safety process for this utility as real- time as possible. We focused on automating every controllable step in emergency response, but allowed the Emergency Dispatch to supervise it in their native environments. By adopting these principles, ERA was able to achieve a revolutionary architecture shift with the buy-in of Dispatch control.”