Designing Who Does Your Field Activities

At this point, you have designed the following:

• Field activity types. These define what you do to your service points.
• SP types. These define the various services that exist at your premises.
• Operations areas. These define the locations from which you dispatch field activities.
• Dispatch groups. These define crews who do your field activities.

Now you have to pull it all together and define which dispatch group performs each field activity at every SP type in every area office. This is a four dimensional matrix that is easier to represent in two dimensions. We'll fill in this matrix for one of our many activity types. You'll need to do this for EVERY activity type:

We made the following assumptions when filling in the above table:

• You have two operations areas: North Area and South Area.
  • The North Area handles all service requests in the northern part of your service territory.
  • The South Area handles all service requests in the southern part of your service territory.
• You have the following dispatch groups in the South Area.
  • North - Gas&Water Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with ALL gas and water service points in the northern area regardless of SP type (i.e., residential and commercial installs are handled by the same group).
  • South - Gas&Water Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with ALL gas and water service points in the southern area regardless of SP type (i.e., residential and commercial installs are handled by the same group).
  • North - Electric Res Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with electric residential service points in the northern area.
  • South - Electric Res Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with electric residential service points in the southern area.
  • North - Electric HV Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with electric commercial service points in the northern area (the HV stands for high voltage).
  • South - Electric HV Crew. This crew performs all field activities associated with electric commercial service points in the southern area (the HV stands for high voltage).

You must fill in the above matrix for EVERY activity type. We'll give you one more example to show how to set up this information if you have centralized dispatching of some types of field activities. Our example assumes that all cuts for non-payment are handled by a single crew located at the North office.

We understand if you have the above situation, there is some redundancy. But this is the price of the flexible design.

At this point, you're ready to set up your field activity types and field activity type profiles. We recommend first setting up your field activity types. Then set up your field activity type profiles designed earlier.