SGN discusses how FYLD has enhanced the utility’s sharp focus on safety, quality and compliance

As global energy consumption and consumer appetite changes, utility and power companies are under more scrutiny than ever before. They are faced with pressure from both customers and regulators to evolve, whether that’s embracing digitisation or making their operations more sustainable, all whilst ensuring the highest levels of health and safety, customer service and energy production.

SGN, a prominent industry leader and major gas distributor supplying natural and green gas to 5.9 million homes and businesses across Scotland and the south of England, has a track record of harnessing innovation to improve their operations. This led them to back FYLD as a concept in 2019, and support its development.

Since, SGN has rolled out our pioneering solution across its workforce as part of a 12-month testing and validation process, with some impressive results.

Group Head of Safety at SGN, Chris Trodd, recently said: “Since implementation, it has significantly increased productivity by reducing job time and increasing personnel utilisation, enhanced health and safety through improved hazard analysis, provided our managers with greater visibility over risks and actionable insights, provided traceability and digital evidence that support compliance, and encouraged better collaboration.

“Longer-term, we can expect FYLD to allow us to drastically reduce paperwork by digitising our reporting processes, avoid fines through enhanced safety, evidencing and communication with the regulators, and save time and money by improving first-time job effectiveness.

“As well as helping to keep our people and the general public safe, and delivering huge efficiencies into the business, it also brings environmental benefits as we’re able to limit unnecessary travel to and from sites, and reduce the use of paper at scale. It’s had a highly positive impact on our business, and with greater adoption, we can expect the same for the wider utilities, construction and rail sectors.”

As FYLD has been designed to revolutionise the safety and efficiency of field teams, for utilities and any organisation with a field-based workforce, we have proven to be the ideal technology partner for SGN.

The partnership has also allowed us to understand and address the real, day-to-day pain points that field workers face. By leveraging that information, we have been able to implement features into the application that address these challenges, from high-risk job alerts and proactive fatigue management, made possible by powerful artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing and machine learning.

SGN has always strived to be at the forefront of digital transformation, and as our mission is to transform the ability of field workers and businesses to make real-time, data-driven decisions to enhance safety, productivity, sustainability and quality, we are proud to work together to turn this into a reality.

If you’d like to hear more about how SGN is using FYLD and the impact it has made on the utility so far, you can read an article authored by Ben Croxford, former Senior Business Partner, Safety, Health & Environment at SGN on page 30 in the August edition of Gas International here.