Service Stream Delivers Essential Utility Network Services at Scale
This utility service business unit, just one from the many in the Australian company Service Stream, supports public and private utilities across the vast state of Western Australia, covering dense metro areas along the coast and remote towns deep in the Outback. The business unit’s field service teams perform 500-1000 offcycle (a.k.a., ad hoc) meter reads and other jobs each day at customer locations scattered around the state.
Utility companies send their orders to Service Stream each in a variety of data formats, ranging from structured data feeds to email attachments. “We don’t have the luxury of one standard, unified B2B system,” explains Craig Longbottom, System & Operations Support Specialist at Service Stream. “Jobs can come in as JSON, XML, PDF, CSV, email, or even sometimes a scanned document. There is also older proprietary metering formats used in some contracts, and we have to pull all that information together and then create efficient routes for our drivers.”
For more than 10 years, Service Stream has been using the Route4Me last mile transportation platform as its “source of truth” for its last mile operation, a single portal that offers a unified view of the business unit’s routes, jobs, and teams in the field. “Route4Me is where everything comes together,” Mr. Longbottom says.
Manual Planning Was “Guesswork”
Currently each workday, the team plans 20 or more routes across five distinct territories around Western Australia, sometimes with 100 or more destinations per route. Offcycle jobs typically require a quick read of a gas, water or power meter. But Service Stream’s drivers also perform maintenance, disconnections and reconnections, and investigations as needed for clients.
Most stops take only a minute or two but are often separated by long drive times. “It’s fast-moving, high-volume work over a massive geographic area, so efficient routing is critical,” says Mr. Longbottom.
In the past, sequencing jobs from different clients into efficient combined routes required manual planning, spreadsheet manipulation, and constant re-planning. “Manually sequencing hundreds of stops is not just slow, it’s guesswork,” says Mr. Longbottom. “The cost of extra drive time really adds up when your service area is the size of a small country.”
Planning Team Creates “Single Source of Truth” for Daily Operations
Today the planning team uses Route4Me in conjunction with the company’s own work order management system, called JAMS, plus several other apps that drivers in the field use to record meter reads or other information for different clients. “Some of our people might be entering data into three or four different apps, depending on which client they’re doing the job for,” Mr. Longbottom explains. “We must keep separated any confidential client information, so this is not sent externally to Route4Me, we leave that in the source apps.”
Work orders from various clients first go into JAMS, where each job destination gets coded with a precise geolocation, time window, a driver assignment, and a special alias that lets the assigned driver know which app to use to record a meter read or other information. From JAMS, the team imports the day’s planned work into Route4Me, which, when jobs from the other separate apps are also added, becomes the “single source of truth” for that day’s operations. Route4Me sequences each driver’s route, minimizing travel while respecting time windows. Currently the separate routes are automatically created based on the driver assignment that is set in JAMS. This then flows into the data file that Route4Me imports.
After the optimization is run, drivers log into the Route4Me mobile app to access their routes. Some then use the app’s native turn-by-turn navigation to complete their routes, marking jobs done in real time. Others use the map in the mobile app as a visual guide or checklist. Either way, Route4Me provides the drivers with a single view of their assignments for the day. “Even if jobs originate in five different systems, the driver sees one clean, optimized route.”
Planners Accommodate Time Windows, Identify Inefficiencies
Service Stream quickly generates optimized routes and distributes them to drivers with a few clicks, saving significant planning and administrative time. Optimized routes, in turn, reduce inefficiencies in drive time and resource allocation, also importantly allowing a safer work environment as drivers are provided with realistic route expectations. This safety aspect is often overlooked, but Service Stream views the safety of its workers as a core pillar in all its processes.
Mr. Longbottom also says that, while experienced drivers may know their route areas by heart, they’ve found Route4Me to be a helpful tool when one driver is filling in for another on an unfamiliar area, or when the company is onboarding a new hire. “For drivers covering other people’s areas, or for new starters, Route4Me is a godsend,” he says. While Service Stream has been a longtime Route4Me user, they only recently began using the software’s time-window logic so the system automatically sequences jobs that must happen in the morning, afternoon, or within a customer-defined service window. “That used to be manual,” Mr. Longbottom says. “Now Route4Me handles it in the sequencing logic, preventing circling back to areas already visited earlier in the day.”
Service Stream also uses the route plan created within Route4Me to identify inefficiencies and safety issues planners could not see before, whether it’s excessive drive time between stops or excessive wait time due to an appointment window. “The biggest value for us is eliminating the invisible waste, the 10 or 15 minutes between every job that we weren’t aware of,” says Mr. Longbottom. “Route4Me has helped us to identify and reduce it where possible, all while providing a safer work environment for our people.” Service Stream also relies on Route4Me to validate contractor mileage claims by comparing actual submissions against the platform’s optimized distance estimates. This gives the company a reliable benchmark for reconciliation and helps ensure accurate, fair payments. “We use it as a sanity check in some business units,” Mr. Longbottom says.
Service Stream Eyes API Integration and Deeper Automation
Looking ahead, Mr. Longbottom is eyeing connecting JAMS directly into Route4Me’s API. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” he says. “The goal is to have jobs come in, our system assign them, Route4Me’s API optimize them, and the crews then receive them automatically in a safe and efficient sequence.”
What won’t change, Mr. Longbottom adds, is the central role for Service Stream’s last mile transportation platform. “Route4Me has given us a way to bring order to a very messy, multi-source workflow,” he says.
