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UtILItY WeeK | 24th - 30th OctOber 2014 | 23 Operations & Assets tened Hannah aer general foreman Stuart Quiney's daughter. The work is part of South West Water's £7.2 million investment to improve the quality of the River Erme and bathing water quality at Moth- ecombe beach ahead of the European Union's revised Bathing Water Direc- tive, which comes into effect in 2015. If you have an asset or project you would like to see featured here, please email: paul.newton@fav-house.com Pipe up Steve Reynolds T oday's mobile technology landscape is laying the groundwork for utility companies to empower field workers in ways never thought possible. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets has seen rapid innovation from original equipment manu- facturers seeking to secure market share, leading to the availability of high-specification devices at very low cost. Now that a large proportion of us are well accustomed to using mobile technology – 70 per cent of UK adults own a smartphone, according to Deloitte – conditions are ideal for a rise in adoption in the utilities sector. Water-resistant and increasingly ruggedised con- sumer mobile devices practically come as standard, almost removing the need to deploy expensive industry- specific devices. Set at a low price point, enterprise-ready smartphones and tablets have led to a paradigm shi in the business case for deployment, to any employee that spends more than 20 per cent of their working week out of the office – not just white collar staff with a need for email and intranet access. Not only have devices transformed the business case, but the cost of supporting systems has also reduced and integration has become simpler as back-end soware has matured. The latest back-office systems, be they ERP, CRM or service management, offer web services and standard customer interfaces that have made integration and data transfer between disparate systems easy and scalable. More and more utility businesses are taking advan- tage of these new mobilisation opportunities and achiev- ing a competitive edge. Holistic field worker visibility, increased productivity, huge efficiency savings and bet- ter customer experience are some of the benefits being enjoyed by tech-savvy companies. Amey's Severn Trent Water division migrated to Micro- so Dynamics CRM and at the same time replaced its rug- ged mobile devices with Windows Lumia smartphones, creating a unified and consistent system between both back-office staff and field workers. UKDN íWaterflow rolled out an effective scheme that incentivises staff to look aer their smartphone with the offer to own it aer the 18-month write-down period. Severn Trent Services has transformed communications through its adoption of smartphones for field technicians, fully integrated in real time with its new universal back-office system, empower- ing control centre staff to focus on customer service. Steve Reynolds, managing director, TBS Enterprise Mobility "Consumer smartphones have almost removed the need for utilities to deploy expensive industry-specific devices." Utilities taking advantage of mobilisation opportunities are achieving a competitive edge