PageOne Communications, the UK’s leading provider of mobile messaging solutions to the public and enterprise sectors, today announced the launch of its Location Suite, a new product designed to help companies ‘map’ their key staff and infrastructure assets. UK Power Networks, which owns and manages the distribution of electricity to homes and businesses in London, Eastern England and the South East, is using the solution to quickly and easily locate the most appropriate engineer to repair an identified fault.

Responsible for three of the UK’s 14 electricity distribution networks, UK Power Networks’ performance is continuously compared to that of the other providers. Each provider is assessed according to the number of power interruptions and how quickly each fault is restored, with the possibility of fines for poor performance. The solution from PageOne plots all of the company’s key substations as ‘points of interest’ on a map alongside a database of its field engineers, which includes the skills and qualifications that they hold. UK Power Networks can expedite the nearest appropriately qualified engineer to the location of a reported high voltage fault, speeding up the response time and helping to minimise the length of a power outage.

The Location Suite is also integrated with UK Power Networks’ paging and SMS system, meaning the company can page and text staff through a dedicated web portal, to find out exactly where they are in relation to a fault. For example, if 30 field engineers were needed at a particular substation at short notice, UK Power Networks could locate all of the engineers within a defined radius, contact them by their preferred method of communication and receive all replies to a dedicated inbox. This provides a single view of the network and a much better co-ordinated response.

“For UK Power Networks, the time between identifying and rectifying a fault is crucial and can help engineers’ efforts to restore power supplies for customers quickly” said Chris Jones, CEO, PageOne Communications. “We’ve worked in partnership with UK Power Networks to create a solution that perfectly matches their business processes, a fact clearly reflected by the dramatic improvement in performance they’ve achieved”.

Kevin Egner, Fault manager at UK Power Networks added, “PageOne’s Location Suite has enabled us to instantly locate our engineers’ proximity to any one of our 1,500 primary substations, and quickly assess which of our staff is most appropriately placed to carry out the job. It’s vitally important for us to mobilise our engineers as soon as possible, because our performance has an impact on our customers and we are also assessed by the industry regulator in terms of the number of power interruptions and minutes lost. As such this technology is already proving to be priceless.”

For further information on PageOne’s Location Suite please visit http://www.pageone.co.uk/services/flare/mapping-and-lbs