Launched in 1935, Top Energy is an electricity network provider and geothermal generator in the NZ Far North. A pillar of the community, the company is dedicated to meeting the energy needs of its customers, optimising long-term value and employing over 150 people.
Top Energy continues digital transformation journey with upgrade from fieldGO to Univerus Field Mobile
Launched in 1935, Top Energy is an electricity network provider and geothermal generator in the NZ Far North. A pillar of the community, the company is dedicated to meeting the energy needs of its customers, optimising long-term value and employing over 150 people. The core of their business means they’ve got many of those employees out in the field, and as part of their on-going commitment to excellence, Top Energy were focusing on how digital transformation could benefit their teams and their customers.
“For us it was about reducing the amount of paperwork we were dealing with,” says Business Systems Coordinator Cameron Gates. “We have lots of different pieces of information that need to be captured for a number of different areas. They all had their own forms and requirements which meant that depending on the type of job, there could be upwards of 12 pieces of paper that had to be filled in, and there was a lot of repetition.”
Creating a productive and paperless environment
Top Energy is one of fieldGO’s (now Univerus Field Mobile) earliest customers. “We signed up just as it was transitioning to fieldGO,” Cameron recalls. “The key focus was automation, so we could ditch our paper-based processes and all the duplication that went with them.”
In addition to replacing paper forms, Top Energy also needed a solution that would:
- Integrate with back-end systems
- Include GIS mapping
Although the company had considered a number of other solutions, finding one that could provide those three key features proved difficult. “fieldGO was the only one that could display our existing assets on a map as well as our jobs,” Cameron explains.
Significant time savings, increased productivity
Since fieldGO was implemented several years ago, Cameron says that their teams have benefitted from a major reduction in duplication and the ability to perform field tasks digitally, using smartphones and mobile devices. “The guys in the field don’t have to spend so much time filling in information,” he says. “No more repetition – they fill it out once on the device and then they can get on with it. They don’t have to worry about losing physical paper forms.”
Top Energy’s administration team are also benefitting from the digital solution. “It’s easier for them to chase up forms that haven’t been filled in,” Cameron explains. “Or if they haven’t been filled in correctly. But there’s also been a reduction in errors too.”
Cameron notes that overall, going digital out in the field has proven beneficial for the team. “It varies from person to person, but for the ones who are pretty good with devices it’s been great,” he says.
Moving with the times – upgrading to Univerus Field Mobile
In keeping with their digital transformation journey, Top Energy upgraded from fieldGO to Univerus Field Mobile as the new fully automated and integrated solution became available. Version 7 provides a new level of functionality, such as:
- The ability to individualise inspections
- The ability to configure applications for specific business models
- The ability to tailor the solution for individual requirements
Univerus customers can now capture what they want in the field, in the way they want. The solution synchronises with multiple platforms across any organisation and provides better visibility of crew movements and simpler functionality. Its key features include:
- The flexibility and scalability to build and capture important mobile data
- Asset data capture and editing in the field
- The ability to capture data across multiple systems
- Full Android, iOS and Windows support
“Overall, the upgrade went relatively smoothly,” Cameron recalls. “All upgrades have issues and we were no exception, but the team at Univerus always responded swiftly to resolve them. And a lot of the features we have now we’ve asked for previously, so their development cycle is pretty efficient – so are their new releases.”
Looking ahead – future plans for Univerus Field Mobile
Because Univerus Field Mobile is flexible and highly configurable, there’s room for continual improvement and new ways to utilise it. “There are a lot more workflows we want to put into it,” Says Cameron. “It’s a cost-effective solution, especially for creating and adjusting forms – we can pretty much do that ourselves and then roll them out. Making changes is easy, and you get a really quick turnaround.
If you’d like to learn more about how the Univerus Field Mobility can help your organisation streamline processes and continue your digital transformation journey, we’d be delighted to start a discussion.
