Hero Platform_ revolutionizes document processing for energy and utility companies. Free up time and resources to focus on what matters most — serving customers.
Accelerate customer service
Take customer service to the next level. Accelerate responses to incidents, service requests, and suppliers while providing more value to customers.
Meet compliance, intelligently
Adapting to change requires agility. Adapt quickly to evolving regulations and maintain compliance, and control, from a single platform.
Transform field notes into action
Our Context-aware OCR reads handwritten field notes like an experienced service technician, transforming handwritten notes into actionable data.
Uses of Automation in the Utility Industry
Attracting and retaining talent is a significant challenge for utility companies. Save your team hundreds of hours and experience a new level of efficiency with an intelligent automation platform.
Process invoices faster
Utility companies receive thousands of invoices with different requirements — each containing critical data that must be manually keyed into an AP system. Natural language processing (NLP) analyzes invoices, finds key data, and automatically updates existing systems. Take your entire invoice process and reduce it from hundreds of clicks to just one with an end-to-end automation platform that intelligently understands how to process each invoice.
Transform field notes
Field technicians working with critical equipment jot down important information in reports and directly onto devices. They also take as many photos as they do notes. But, with fewer employees in the field, this valuable knowledge is often trapped in someone’s camera roll or handwritten notes. Data is an institutional asset that should be accessible and shareable. Our Context-aware OCR transforms handwritten field notes and important symbols in images into useful data with the same expertise as a seasoned technician.
Utility Industry Automation
Utility companies find themselves performing a number of balancing acts. They are constantly weighing the costs of providing service against new customer demands. And, they work in a highly regulated space where plenty of processes are still done manually.
Optimize maintenance checks
The public counts on utility equipment for reliable service and safety; therefore, ensuring machinery is in working order is critical. Proactively anticipating potential equipment issues and responding before a failure occurs is essential to public safety. Hero Platform_ converts inspection reports into valuable data in seconds — helping technicians identify trends, so they spend less time reacting to problems and more time preventing them.
Help teams stay in compliance
Hero Platform_ can help finance and other teams pull data instantly from multiple systems (including a centralized ADMS) and upload it into a new document. Then, as relevant information that impacts the reporting becomes available, our platform can extract the information and update the database automatically — shortening compliance reporting from weeks to days while reducing the risk of human error by automating data extraction and input.
Automate common customer requests
Some of the most common requests are minor address changes, billing inquiries, or the starting and stopping of services. But these take service reps away from their core duties. Hero Platform_ easily automates these repetitive tasks and integrates all notifications with existing comms systems. Our intent classification AI accurately understands messages and can even automate incident responses — or route emails needing a human touch to the proper department — improving your customer satisfaction score and the quality of customer service.
Stability & scalability: deploying intelligent document processing (IDP) as a microservice
Whether scaling up or down, platforms need to be built for rock-solid, stable performance. Your business depends on it. That’s why scalability and stability are the core pillars of the Hero Platform_.
Classifying and inputting documents
The best CRMs, document management software, and ADMS systems need help managing the data points locked away in unstructured documents. Since these systems do not integrate easily, it makes it difficult to sync data points with a central database.
Hero Platform_’s Intelligent document processing offers an “intelligence” fabric for deeper collaboration. Hero Platform_ reads invoices, contracts, customer applications, and technical procedures, such as work orders and meter readings, like a team of highly skilled technicians. It automatically sorts incoming documents into categories and extracts information from scanned copies of handwritten notes with above-human accuracy.
Our Context-aware OCR also reads handwritten field notes like your most experienced service technician and transforms handwriting into action. Experience a new level of efficiency with Hero Platform_ and watch customer satisfaction soar.
In the table, Competitor 1 converted the handwriting into gibberish - while Competitor 2 didn't perform much better. On the other hand, Automation Hero's Context-aware OCR recognized and converted scribble with 100% accuracy, even with cursive scrawl and poor scan quality.
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How Automation Hero works with Energy & Utility compainies
Hero Platform_ can replace an entire labor-intensive, error-prone process with an automated, intelligent workflow. Our end-to-end intelligent automation platform allows utility companies to streamline operations and anticipate what’s next.
Energy and utility companies operate in a highly regulated space with many manual processes. Add to this a huge range of reporting requirements and software systems that need to be more easily integrated, and you can end up with inefficient processes that weigh down the bottom line.
Fortunately, Hero Platform_ easily integrates data with existing systems. Our API can transform an existing ADMS or database into an “intelligence fabric” that makes critical compliance information immediately available for analysis. Working with a manufacturer of high-speed engines and propulsion systems, Automation Hero devised a two-step AI model that helped the company reduce the time its machines sat idle.
How Automation Hero puts AI to work
1) First, our patent-pending Context-aware OCR converts unstructured data in equipment inspection reports and handwritten field inspection notes into structured data in seconds.
2) Then, our classification AI model automatically sorts claims into categories to help the company proactively manage its equipment, including transformer and generator assets and bucket trucks.
3) Finally, our platform identifies trends so that companies can perform proactive maintenance on the equipment — helping technicians spend less time reacting to problems and more time preventing them.
Demonstration Videos
FAQ
What can be automated in the Utility Industry?
Intelligent Automation (IA) can automate various routine tasks and essential business processes in the Utility Industry. These include meter reading, work order management, invoicing and billing, compliance and regulatory reporting, email triaging, customer service, and onboarding. By automating these workflows, utility companies can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and free up time for employees to focus on higher-value tasks. As a result, intelligent automation can be a powerful tool for improving the quality of operations and service delivery across various departments within a utility company.
How much impact can come from automation in the Utility Industry?
According to recent studies, intelligent automation can help utility companies reduce costs by up to 40% while increasing productivity by as much as 60%. As a result, automation in the Utility Industry can have a significant impact, with substantial improvements in system efficiency by up to 20%, increased workforce productivity by up to 30%, reduced maintenance and repair costs by up to 30%, and reduced downtime by up to 25% with significant safety improvements for utility employees. These figures are based on studies by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG), and the United States Department of Energy (DOE).
How does software automation improve efficiency?
Software automation streamlines everyday tasks and reduces the time and effort required for employees to complete them. For example, the utility industry includes billing and payment processing, customer service, data management, maintenance checks, and repairs. Since intelligent document processing (IDP) processes any document with above-human accuracy, utility companies can expect efficiency improvements across multiple areas of their daily operations, including meter reading, work order management, invoicing and billing, compliance reporting, and customer onboarding. As a result, utility companies can reduce errors, improve efficiency, and provide better customer service by automating document-centric tasks that slow down normal daily business operations.
Which tasks of customer experience can be automated?
Several customer experience tasks can be automated at utility companies, such as billing and invoicing, customer service inquiries, outage notifications, service requests, and meter readings. Additionally, the increased adoption of smart utility meters equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors can automatically transmit meter readings, eliminating the need for manual meter reading and improving accuracy. However, for the millions of customers who have not installed a newer utility product, manual meter reading can be replaced with technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can read meter values from images of meter displays. Automation reduces wait times, improves billing accuracy, and gives customers access to faster and more accurate information.
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