Fayetteville Public Utilities was created in 2002 with the consolidation of the preexisting electric, natural gas and water/sewer utility departments that already served Fayetteville and Lincoln County, Tennessee.
"When the City of Fayetteville consolidated our three utility operations, the areas of accounting and customer service were combined and consolidated first," said Britt Dye, CEO and general manager of Fayetteville Public Utilities. "Since our early stages of consolidation, we have continued to fine-tune our utility operation so that more areas of service are combined to enhance and improve how we operate. Bringing three separate and very different utility operations together and streamlining each department's operation for handling routine service orders, outage reports and response procedures, and most of all, improving the way we schedule new utility construction have been our main focus for the past few years. This is why we chose Trimble. Not only will the new system provide better, more accurate information to our employees so that we make better decisions for planned construction and outage response, it will also improve service to our customers. Overall we can continue to fine-tune our entire operation with the new technology."
"We're all about providing customer service that's second-to-none at FPU," Dye adds. "We are always looking to improve the services we currently offer to our customers and the accuracy in our daily operations. We expect that Trimble technology will take us several steps forward in doing just that."
FPU will be implementing the UtilityCenter uaField(TM) mobile GIS, uaFM(TM) desktop GIS, and uaDispatch(TM) outage management modules as well as direct interfaces to its Customer Information System (CIS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
"With accurate maps and data, we will be able to make better engineering decisions based on the right information," said Dye. "With this, we can improve on system reliability and also on the quality of electric, water, sewer and natural gas that we deliver to Fayetteville Public Utilities' customers."
"With the enhanced information that includes all the utility facilities and customer data, we can locate the problems more quickly and accurately. When it comes to being responsible for all utilities with the information we now have, we can find any utility infrastructure quicker and with more accuracy than before. With the outage management system, we are able to perform a trace for utilities dependant upon a water problem, gas, electric or wastewater automatically and know which customers are affected."
UtilityCenter provides a modular map-based utility management platform for field personnel, engineers and management. The UtilityCenter uaField module allows the mobile workers to access the utility's GIS to automate field engineering and work management to improve efficiency and increase productivity.
The UtilityCenter uaFM module provides the core GIS and asset management functionality in the office. It extends ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop for a complete Asset Management and Facility Management (AM/FM) tool that provides a visual representation of land base, facility assets, the utility network, and customers. uaFM enables ArcGIS Desktop to understand, create, complete, and edit features specific to the utility environment and works in conjunction with the entire UtilityCenter suite of applications to provide a cohesive business solution. The new solution will allow FPU to distribute GIS data and interface with its CIS to support workflow for utility billing, accounting, engineering, and operations.
UtilityCenter uaDispatch is the key to outage restoration and improved customer service. The uaDispatch module offers an easy option for managing utility outage needs, resulting in faster response times, and, ultimately, enhanced system performance and customer service.
Trimble's UtilityCenter software is currently used by more than 100 electric, gas, water and wastewater utilities throughout the U.S.
Trimble's Utilities Field Solutions group specializes in implementing enterprise mobile workforce, computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), asset management, field data collection, staking and inspection solutions for electric, gas, water/wastewater and solid waste utilities. Trimble's UtilityCenter, Fieldport(R), and Utility Fleet Manager enterprise solutions automate utility operations which can lead to increased field worker productivity, enhanced customer service and faster emergency response.
For more information about Trimble's utility enterprise solutions, visit: www.trimble.com/ufs
About Fayetteville Public Utilities
Fayetteville Public Utilities is a multiple service provider servicing over 31,000 total utility meters in Fayetteville and Lincoln County located in southern middle Tennessee.
For more information visit: www.fpu-tn.com
About Trimble
Trimble applies technology to make field and mobile workers in businesses and government significantly more productive. Solutions are focused on applications requiring position or location - including surveying, construction, agriculture, fleet and asset management, public safety and mapping. In addition to utilizing positioning technologies, such as GPS, lasers and optics, Trimble solutions may include software content specific to the needs of the user. Wireless technologies are utilized to deliver the solution to the user and to ensure a tight coupling of the field and the back office. Founded in 1978, Trimble is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.
For more information visit: www.trimble.com
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