CrewPoint

Overview

CrewPoint is a scheduling application that was developed by a third-party agency for CenterPoint Energy to help the electric operations teams prioritize and schedule maintenance work and attempt to automate a lot of the manual processes that the company still operated on. However, the project suffered from shifting priorities and cost overruns and was never fully completed. I was brought in to help make design and workflow improvements in an effort to reach the ideal north star state of the application.

Discovery

Most of the feedback that was gathered previously was done remotely through online meetings. I insisted on scheduling on-site visits to the individual service centers to meet with the operations teams so that we would have a better understanding of their day-to-day activities and see how CrewPoint was currently being utilized.

My main goal was to study their behavior in the context of prioritizing and scheduling work at the service centers to better inform our design decisions and learn how we could improve the CrewPoint experience and achieve better outcomes for the business.

Understanding the need

Funding cuts and shifting priorities have burdened operations teams, making it more difficult to do their jobs. Using CrewPoint in it’s current state is such an impediment to their workflows that service centers continue to operate the way they have been prior to CrewPoint, with a lot of offline and manual processes.

Because of this, operations teams spend a lot of time copying, pasting and switching between multiple applications (CrewPoint, Email, SAP, Excel, PowerBI) resulting in very inefficient workflows with a high cognitive load, prone to error and extremely low adoption rates for CrewPoint.

Key Findings

Manual Workflows
Workflows still suffer from manual processes which are time consuming, prone to error and often inaccurate.

Offline Processes
Every week, planners/schedulers need to gather estimates from operations managers who need to evaluate individual crew members to determine their availability for work.

Limited Work Order Visibility
Planners/Schedulers cannot view SAP work order details and worksite sketches in CrewPoint.

Load Times and Crashes
Inline table editing takes a huge toll on app performance leading to extremely long load times and crashes.

Framing the scope

Design Objective: Enable electric operations to better predict capacity and make workflows more efficient for planners/schedulers, operations managers and technicians.

Desired Outcome: Reduced crew downtime and more reliability work for the power distribution group is prioritized and scheduled.

Research

Over the course of 6 weeks, we scheduled on-site visits to the various service centers around Houston to meet with planners/schedulers, operations managers and supervisors to observe their day-to-day while they prioritized and scheduled work and learn about their experience with CrewPoint.

I facilitated a series of research workshops with cross-functional teams to help us understand the end-to-end work order journey, identify opportunities for improvement and prioritize ideas based on impact and feasibility with a focus on delivering value.

Drilling Down

One of the biggest pain points that was identified was the process of capacity estimation and more specifically, collecting that information from the operations managers from the 12 service centers around Houston who, in turn, had to collect that information from individual crew members every week.

This was still very much a highly inefficient manual process that was not always accurate, prone to error, and very time consuming for everyone involved.

We also observed planners/schedulers jumping back and forth between CrewPoint, SAP, Excel, PowerBI and Outlook, exporting data, and copying and pasting between apps as they prioritized and scheduled work.

Solutioning

Dashboard for Planners/Schedulers
Creates transparency and allows planners/schedulers to review all incoming unassigned work orders from SAP, reducing the need to copy/paste and switch between apps.

Workforce Hub Integration
Completely eliminates the need of manually collecting crew capacity every week.

Work Order Category Tracking
Assures that planners/schedulers assign a proper mix of reliability work to be prioritized and scheduled.

View work order details in CrewPoint
Greatly improves performance and further reduces the need to multi-task, copy/paste and switch between applications (SAP, Power BI, Excel).

Overhaul UI with new design system
Improves usability and performance, reduces app development time, and adds much needed functionality while creating a cohesive experience across all applications and platforms.

Outcomes

Redesigning these key features in CrewPoint resulted in a massive increase in workflow efficiency, app performance and user satisfaction.

5x

Improvement in app performance

80%

Improvement in productivity

~3,000

Additional utility poles fixed per year