Solutions | Energy
Energy Usage Notifications
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An energy brokerage firm migrating to a new VoIP platform is looking for a way to notify its customers, wholesale electric utility supply companies, of when they are in jeopardy of surpassing their wattage limit and must switch to another supply source on the power grid. The process requires communicating with several entities at once, and the notifications must be recorded as per federal regulations. The energy brokerage firm is looking to further enhance their solution by creating a closed loop system that confirms the customers have been called when their wattage consumption has reached a certain point.
Solving this challenge will benefit the energy brokerage firm in the following ways:
- Communicating with customers approaching their wattage consumption limit is mission critical to the business of brokering power utilities; supporting this requirement with the new VoIP infrastructure allows the company to stay with their current VoIP migration strategy, supporting all communications requirements.
- Creating a closed loop process ensures the customer notification process takes place, keeping the brokerage firm within federal guidelines and improving customer satisfaction.
- Reducing the risk of shutting down a customer means reducing the chances of lost revenue and/or the risk of potential legal sanctions by the customer in retaliation to loss of service.
- Sophisticated technologies and processes that protect the customer bring higher rates of revenue in the market, accelerating the ROI from the VoIP migration.
Solution
The focus of this solution is to utilize the VoIP infrastructure to create an effective customer notification process that meets all federal regulations
- Sophisticated systems monitoring power consumption notify a broker that one of their customers is approaching their power consumption limit. The broker selects an icon on the IP phone that initiates a conference call with multiple parties at the customer’s business and their brokerage firm to communicate the impending event.
- Conference calls to customers are recorded automatically and are available for playback to review as to when the customer was notified and who participated on the call per federal regulations; the file can be downloaded and provided to any federal agents performing routine investigations of the firm’s operations.
- When a conference call is initiated, management is automatically alerted; they can decide to monitor the call and at any time guide the broker through the call ,or even join the conference and participate if needed.
- A backend routine queries the system monitoring power consumption for those customers that have been identified as at-risk and verifies that the customers have been called within a specified amount of time by querying the VoIP infrastructure’s event logs; if the customer has not been notified, the situation is escalated to management.
- Once the conference call is made to the customer, a back-end routine updates the customer records for a closed loop solution.
Emergency Management for Refineries
- Hits: 199
A refining facility producing various petroleum products uses several dangerous chemicals in its processing. There are several chemical spill response teams, each with its expertise in different chemicals. Depending on the time of day and location within the refinery, it can be a challenge to notify the appropriate response team members. Smart mobile devices can help to solve the challenge, but the refinery has recently invested in VoIP and is looking to standardize communication on one platform, not multiple.
Solving this challenge will benefit the refinery in the following ways:
- By notifying the correct team members with the appropriate expertise, the refinery will lessen response times as well as injuries in dealing with a chemical spill.
- By utilizing the VoIP infrastructure to improve emergency responses, the refinery increases its ROI beyond cost of ownership through potential reductions to plant damage and insurance costs.
- By extending its VoIP infrastructure to incorporate standard issue smart mobile devices, impact is extended to the cellular infrastructure, which follows employees throughout the plant site and off-site as well.
- By extending communication tools to smart mobile devices, the refinery can maintain communications with its response teams 24/7, allowing for more plant operations information to be shared before and after critical events and helping response team members be better prepared for emergency operations.
Solution
The focus of this solution is to utilize the VoIP infrastructure to create an effective customer notification process that meets all federal regulations
- IPcelerate’s solution receives an alert from monitoring systems at the plant; IPsession immediately sends out notifications to IP phones throughout the plant and to response team members’ smart mobile devices.
- The notifications sent to the response teams contain location information provided by the monitoring system; members are able to verify each others’ position and determine who is closest to the spill and can take the lead in responding to the emergency.
- The first responder hits an icon on their mobile device to initiate an instant conference call to report on the incident and coordinate activities between other team members.
- The conference calls are automatically recorded for later review and training as the refinery continues to improve on its response procedures; the recorded calls can be downloaded to the smart mobile devices so those response teams arriving later can listen to the recordings and be better informed of the current situation.
- Employees can update their status of involvement which is viewable by others as management looks to maintain the correct resources until the emergency is under control.