Successes - Montgomery Water Works
Alabama Utility Saves Over 2,000 Hours Annually in Data Input Time with Westbrook Fortis

With over 80,000 water accounts to manage, Montgomery Water Works and Sanitary Sewer Board’s Customer Service Department had hired five extra staff members to handle data entry and quality control measures established for the data input of their work orders. With numerous data fields to enter including the customer’s service account number, work order number, work order type, name of the work order, customer’s name, residence address and date the service was scheduled, these tasks were taking about 50 hours each week to complete and leaving the staff about a month behind.

After comparing several document management solutions, the Information Systems Department chose Westbrook Fortis. Within three months, one member of the Customer Service Department was scanning 500 work orders daily – instead of five - reducing the workload by 40 hours per week.

“Prior to Fortis, our staff was inputting data from over 80,000 accounts, which range in size from one to two pages (for residential customers) to up to six pages (for contractors). These included the customer’s service account number, work order number, work order type, name of the work order, customer’s name and residence address and date the service was scheduled,” said Barbara McDonald, customer service office assistant. “Then, another staff member would double-check the data. When accessing these work orders, all information had to be retyped.” McDonald said it used to take an hour to key in about 100 documents with all these fields. “Now, we are accomplishing the data input five times faster,” she said. This is freeing up staff to be reallocated to perform tasks in other business areas of the department.

The information has become a key element in the creation of a comprehensive customer database that reaches across the entire organization and enhances Customer Relationship Management (CRM). For instance, work orders are used by the Field Service staff when visiting customer sites. Assignments erformed include terminating water service, repairing pipe bursts and leaks and nvestigating incorrect meter readings.

Upon completion, the Field Service staff member returns the work order to ustomer Service where it is scanned into their Fortis system for immediate recovery by account number, address, entry date, work order number or type of service performed. These completed work orders include hand-written comments and enable the Call Center Department to view summaries of site visits to answer customer calls. Field Service staff also use Fortis to access previous work orders to review site history before returning to the same address.

The Human Resources (HR) Department has integrated Fortis with their Lawson Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Using Fortis EnableIt, HR documents are scanned into Fortis and indexed with data that has been keyed into Lawson, eliminating duplicate data entry. Archived documents can also be retrieved from Fortis directly from a Lawson employee record. An HR staff member clicks on the Fortis EnableIt toolbar from within the Lawson application, and Fortis EnableIt queries Fortis and retrieves all HR files associated with that employee’s name and number.

The Accounting Department uses Fortis for disaster recovery according to Byron Glass, senior systems director. “Stop cards,” which denote every water main location in Montgomery and contain a small drawing depicting the placement of the water tap in relation to a residence and underground connections, date back to the 1900s. With over 100,000 of these cards holding such critical information, Fortis ensures they remain secure and eliminates the paper format. It also allows the data to be accessible throughout the organization where it is used to make accurate and informed decisions relating to water tap installations, improve safety measures and prevent costly mistakes relative to placement.

The main Water Works office and two additional sites within Montgomery have access to the Fortis files, which are stored on a WAN server. This alleviates the need for staff to travel among the locations. Fortis runs in Oracle on a Sun Enterprise 4000 system.

Future plans for Fortis include capturing bank drafts and military waivers. Access to these waivers is critical as the form reflects which customers are military personnel and are exempt from paying a service deposit.

“Fortis is a great fit for our needs. Not only did it completely turn around the Customer Service work order process, but upon seeing its potential, Accounting and HR were onboard soon after,” said Glass.

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