DEWA provides its field staff with a unified mobile solution that is user friendly, information-rich, has GIS Maps, and can overcome daily challenges faced by the field staff while performing planned and unplanned maintenance and operational activities. DEWA intends to achieve the 10X vision and make the most of its expertise and technologies to overcome the following challenges:
-Printing of GIS Maps, Data Sheets, which is unfriendly eco practice.
-Late response in the communication between field staff and back office to confirm or update certain information, through accessing different enterprise systems in silos.
-Duplication of work in recording, reporting, and re-entering the information into the enterprise systems back in the office.
-The possibilities of errors while manual entry of information in the systems.
-Lack the ability to display interactive digital GIS Maps, such as Points, Linear and Polygon items with the ability to measure distance, zoom-in and -out, and navigate through Maps
-Lack of tracking the location of field crew in near real-time to assign job orders.
-Lack of possibility to navigate through millions of over-ground & under-ground assets around city of Dubai.
The Idea
Based on the past challenges, considering lessons learned, standards and benchmark with best practices several ideas have been received through Afkari Platform (DEWA's unique ideation platform) to introduce a robust mobile solution for field staff, that combines the ruggedness of tough IP64 rated hardware along with app smartness. These ideas meant to construct successful mobile application called Duroob. Duroob serves the maintenance, operations, and planning of DEWA's value chain in four core divisions: Transmission Power (TP), Distribution Power (DP), Water & Civil (W&C) and Power & Water Planning (P&WP), with total of 1,800 users.
Features
-Duroob is a major on-the-go solution for taking rich digital maps to the field.
-Help DEWA field staff to perform data collection and editing, find assets and information, and report their real-time locations.
-Enables fields staff to view over-ground and under-ground features, analyse, navigate, redline and collect live data from the field on the spot with 3D proficiencies.
-Offline capability without connecting to DEWA network especially in remote areas.
-Display to the users based on their access permission.
-Real time DEWA GIS assets observations updates from the field.
-Reduce back office communication and rework.
-Reduce physical contacts using Duroob instead of carrying paper maps and meeting back office employees to update the field observations
-Quick DEWA network assets information on the map.
-Field crew tracking and allocating the work to the nearest crew member to the required site.
-Well organized plot survey workflow using field devices.
Technology
Duroob is constructed from several software, hardware, network and security technologies. The software has ESRI technologies like ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, Survey 123, Tracker for ArcGIS, and Navigator. It has IP64 rugged handhelds for easy management of individual or bulk devices. It has Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) technology to deploy, update, and wipe the applications as and when required remotely. A high measures of security standards have been deployed to protect the software application, and data traffic end-to-end between the device and backend systems, with VPN network, and firewall gates.
Result
-1,800 Rugged handhelds powered with information on millions of GIS Network objects are readily available for field users.
-Improved productivity of field employees by 6 times faster than earlier.
-Reduced average 15% of rework due to insufficient information.
-Replaced paper maps with data-rich digital maps. Zero printing.
-Application contributes to achieve internal quarterly measured KPI's across DEWA divisions.
-Expedite Inspection and As-built verification and minimize Site visit through collaboration.
-Raised field staff happiness from 89% to 94%.
Achievements:
-12th Global Continual Improvement & Innovation Symposium Award 2020 for eco-friendly Project category.
-Enterprise Asia - International Innovation Award 2020 for Innovative application.
-Ideas America 2021 Silver Award in Green Idea of the Year category.
-DEWA Divisional Level Award 2021 for best Agile Project.
Duroob played a vital role in the growth of the city of Dubai, meeting the 10X vision announced by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, by fostering the transformation of Smart Grid, replacing the electro-mechanical meters with Smart Meters, and rapidly supporting the inspection and activation of assets around Dubai, which enabled DEWA to meet and exceed customer's happiness rates.