December 9th Clustre Breakfast Briefing – Executive Summary

How do you capture critical front-line data faster and more efficiently? How do you share this intelligence instantly with technical teams, service centres and business developers? How do you deliver seamless customer satisfaction within a hugely complex, cost-competitive industry?

We invited Ramani Hariharan – head of ENGIE’s New Business Factory – to answer these key questions at our December breakfast briefing.

Ramani started on a sombre note by acknowledging the dreadful accident last week at the water treatment plant in Avonmouth, in which four men lost their lives. A stark reminder of the dangers inherent in the utilities industry.

Ramani’s primary role is to build new businesses for ENGIE. His goal is to co-develop innovative products and services that drive ENGIE – and its customers – towards a net zero economy. A key element in Ramani’s approach it to work with innovative start-ups to co-create solutions that are directly relevant to ENGIE’s business.

ENGIE has a large field service workforce and owns and operates power plants, and various energy facilities – gas distribution systems and storage facilities, electricity and gas transmission systems, pipelines, buildings and industrial facilities for many customers. Its operational imperative is to be cost-competitive without compromising on reliability, availability or health and safety.

Capturing human intelligence via smart video notes

Ramani drew an analogy with the pilot of a plane who has everything under control via the instruments in the cockpit. The challenge is how to achieve this level of control in a large-scale industrial installation.

To take a real-life example, ENGIE has dozens of people typically operating a power plant in the Middle East; during times of maintenance shutdowns, this figure jumps to hundreds of people. It can be a high-pressure environment (both literally and figuratively). How can technology be used to capture and augment the information available from the workforce in such an environment?

To address this challenge, the New Business Factory team managed by Ramani worked with smart video technology company Vyntelligence:

  • Vyntelligence helps industrial companies gain greater visibility and insights over their assets and operations, by empowering field engineers to create smart video reports directly on site. Their artificial intelligence technology then helps these businesses efficiently interpret, analyse and act on these data insights.
  • To illustrate how this works, in the power plant in the Middle East, an operator was tasked with identifying potential hazards. He went out, with the Vyntelligence app on his smartphone, and came across a black curtain behind which was a sheer drop into the turbine hall. If a worker wandered through this curtain they might easily fall from a dangerous height, a leading cause of accidents.
  • The normal process would have been to capture this hazard with pen and paper for subsequent transcription to an excel spreadsheet for eventual action
  • With the Vyntelligence smart video app, the operator was able to record the hazard and immediately upload it to the control centre, where the power and immediacy of the video enabled the manager to take immediate action and, importantly, also be able to disseminate this potential risk to other power-plants. The time from seeing the hazard to taking action was reduced dramatically.

From pilot projects to co-created value

Ramani’s two-year journey with Vyntelligence started with a pilot project to capture the condition of assets in a set of buildings managed on behalf of an industrial customer in the U.K.. The approach was to create and prove a simple storyboard to capture the condition of an asset in a complex building. The result was a 5x increase in productivity.

Pilots of this nature, carried out within tight time and cost constraints, are key to the New Business Factory’s approach in working with innovative start-ups. If the pilot is successful, then the next question is how to further develop the ideas – either by entering into a contract with the start-up or, if the solution is of strategic value, by investing in them in order to co-create further solutions directly relevant to Engie’s specific problems and opportunities.

With Vyntelligence, this co-creation approach has led to Health and Safety becoming one of the most important applications of the Vyntelligence platform – trialled first in the power-plant in the Middle East and now in the process of being scaled up globally. This programme, called Fresh Eyes, is poised to leverage the convenience of the Vyntelligence app, which captures everything on a simple smartphone that does not suffer from boredom or fatigue.

The field workforce really like the app because it’s so much more convenient than filling in forms and filing reports. They want to diagnose and fix problems, not populate spreadsheets.

In summary, Ramani sees Vyntelligence as a simple application that can create tremendous value for ENGIE, by co-creating solutions that solve real problems for their customers and workforce.

DISCUSSION AND Q&A

In the discussion that followed, questions were answered by both Ramani and by Kapil Singhal, co-founder and CEO of Vyntelligence.

What makes Vyntelligence especially effective in enabling the field workforce?

VYN stands for “video your notes”. It’s a highly effective, asynchronous, many-to-many means of communication. A field engineer, instead of filling in a checklist, can now take a video which captures more information and communicates it more powerfully than could ever be achieved using pen and paper. Artificial intelligence then enables immediate decision making, using geolocation, operator ID, speech to text, computer vision, etc. 

The drive for utilities to become carbon neutral and the impact of Covid-19, mean that utilities have to increase their effectiveness, without increasing their field workforce. This means achieving better outcomes with fewer field visits and having more problems fixed first time. The best way to do this is through the effective use of artificial intelligence and the most effective way to capture the data needed is via smart video notes.

Could you say a little more about the asset maintenance use-case?

Yes, for example, ENGIE was bidding for a facilities management contract and had to get a snapshot of assets “as is” in order to quantify the work needed to bring them up to standard and maintain them over the life of the contract. Vyntelligence greatly accelerated this process by enabling the team to simply take videos of the plant and point out the things that needed fixing, rather than having to go top-down, asset by asset, checklist by checklist.

How well does the app cope with regional accents?

Vyntelligence has been deployed nationwide in the UK and, so far, has been pretty good at coping with regional accents. The system uses machine learning to improve and adapt and has been used with other languages, including Chinese, French and Portuguese.

Can the app be used by customers to self-serve?

This use-case has really come to life this year because of Covid-19. Vyntelligence have deployed a brand-new set of capabilities to facilitate this and can now send a “magic link” to a customer which guides them through the process of recording the right video snippets. They don’t need to download the app itself.

This means the engineer can analyse the best way to fix the problem and make sure the right person is sent to fix the problem first time, if necessary. As a result, one of Vyntelligence’s customers has reduced field service visits by 54%.

Are there other customer related benefits?

Yes, for example, an Asian energy services provider had a problem with carrying out pre-installation surveys for smart meters. Engineers would get to the site but then struggle to find or get to the meter. By using Vyntelligence they reduced the time taken to get the smart meters installed resulting in fewer failed visits and a higher level of customer satisfaction.

What about remote assets in rural areas where there is no phone signal?

The app works offline – you don’t need connectivity at the work site. For example, boiler engineers working in homes without internet service can record their video notes and they will be uploaded as soon as they are back in connection with the internet.

What is the typical implementation approach and timescale for Vyntelligence?

It typically takes around three elapsed weeks and about five to seven one-hour conversations to understand the current process and information flow sufficiently for Vyntelligence’s data scientists and business analysts to create the initial storyboarded app (the storyboard is the set of prompts that guide the user through the use-case specific recording of their smart video notes).

The challenge is not the technology, it’s getting access to the right people and having sufficient clarity on the business problem. The success factors are usually:

  • Leadership commitment and understanding of the business case from day one
  • Making sure the implementation is part of the business workflow (not a sideshow)
  • Measuring the right metrics – always looking for at least a 5x improvement
  • Using the customer success team to systematically bring people on to the system
  • Helping users accept they will give up parts of their old process.

How much of a challenge is data integration between Vyntelligence and existing systems?

Vyntelligence is designed to have open API integration with existing systems (Salesforce, SAP etc.) – as long as Vyntelligence can access the API then the first level of integration is really just like a video link which can be shared. The data itself can be standalone within the Vyntelligence platform or integrated to deliver the second and third level benefits that come from actionable insights.

How will this technology evolve in the future?

The next phase will be to eliminate the need for humans to analyse the video by having AI prioritise the insights and actions. For example, identifying health and safety issues.

The evolution of the technology will be hand-in-hand with the evolution of the field workforce. Indeed, it will play a key part in designing and planning the future workforce. For example, by eliminating the need for a first visit by an engineer (because the customer can provide that data via the app) you bring more junior engineers to the forefront and have them make decisions, augmented by the technology.

CLOSING REMARKS

In closing the discussion, Ramani emphasised the value of co-creating solutions in the way the New Business Factory has done with Vyntelligence.

The utilities industry is not known for the pace of its innovation. If that is going to change it will have to engage more effectively with innovative start-ups, who can only go as far and as fast as their customers drive them.

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