Although power restoration is a technical challenge, it is also a logistical feat. Quick restoration after a storm requires coordination across hundreds or even thousands of crews, many of which are contractors and mutual aid partners arriving from other service territories.
As severe weather increases in frequency and scale, manual processes fail to deliver the speed and agility storm response demands. A contractor may commit several hundred workers to assist with storm recovery, but the roster utilities receive is often outdated within hours. Illness, travel issues and equipment changes can impact crew status long before they arrive at a staging site. In the field, crews carrying paper feeder maps work from circuit programs that are obsolete as soon as they're printed. Damage notes written by hand must be transcribed into an outage management system at the end of the day, delaying the process of prioritizing repairs. Safety risks also emerge when crews work from incomplete or inaccurate information.
On the contrary, moving away from reactive, manual, and paper-based processes to mobile workforce management solutions can streamline operations, enhance situational awareness and accelerate safe restoration.
The Missing Puzzle Piece: Workforce Visibility and Automation
Today’s power grid is outfitted with sophisticated digital infrastructure. Utilities have also advanced their digital ecosystem of software and data to make power restoration safer and more efficient. These include outage management systems that use predictive analytics to anticipate faults and focus damage assessments, as well as advanced GIS capabilities that precisely map service areas, lines and assets.
For many utilities, the missing piece is a single, unified view of operations, people, work, and assets. Today, workforce management solutions are filling the gap, providing real-time visibility that accelerates storm response and restoration by enabling utilities to:
Mobilize Crews Faster: In any emergency or major event, the first and most crucial step is assembling the right people to respond as quickly as possible. Workforce management solutions tie together Blue Sky operations and emergency response, allowing utilities to easily coordinate work across native crews, contractors and mutual aid crews.
With a real-time understanding of staff availability and automated tools, utilities can easily identify, select and notify available crews, within seconds, based on pre-defined criteria, such as union agreements, certifications, proximity and shift rules.
Visibility into where crews are, what they're working on, which equipment or vehicles have arrived and where assets are needed next lets managers redeploy resources quickly, avoid duplication and minimize “windshield time.”
Increase Situational Awareness: Damage assessments captured in the field flow directly into an outage management system. Crews know which equipment they'll encounter before opening a breaker box. This visibility allows them to take the safest and most efficient next step, whether repairing a downed line or performing proactive sweeps for partially damaged assets. Outage and damage information is part of situational awareness, but resource information is also critical. Knowing how many resources, of what type and where/when they'll arrive is essential to gaining effective situational awareness.
Streamline Crew Logistics: Lodging and logistics for mutual assistance crews directly affect response speed, crew safety and costs. Although scale, uncertainty, local limitations and operational complexity make lodging and logistics difficult, they are a critical aspect of mutual aid and disaster response.
Workforce management solutions offer integrations that centralize data, allowing utilities to manage reservations alongside crews in a single interface that provides clear visibility into lodging needs. Access to bulk hotel booking information reduces manual data entry for lodging coordinators, ensuring reliable and cost-effective housing for mutual aid crews and minimizing unnecessary expenses for unused rooms. Automatic notifications are triggered when room reservations exceed the number of booked rooms, allowing lodging managers to correct allocations proactively.
The Road Ahead
Crews must see clear value in the tools provided – fewer steps, faster access to the right data and safer decision making under routine conditions. They already use mobile apps for navigation, communication and manuals, but under storm conditions, might fall back on whatever will let them work fast, even if it means scribbling on a paper map.
The most effective workforce management initiatives start small, allow field crews to validate solutions and deliver quick wins. For example, replacing paper feeder maps with secured access to digital circuit diagrams, accessed through an API that filters only the relevant patrol routes, immediately improves safety and efficiency without overwhelming crews with unnecessary data.
By eliminating paper bottlenecks, integrating digital systems and empowering crews with real-time information, utilities can strengthen resilience against increasingly destructive storms. The payoff is faster restoration, improved safety and more efficient use of resources – benefits that matter not only to utilities but to every customer who depends on reliable power.