Electrical Load Management Provider Boosts Productivity with ArcLogistics

GoodCents Solutions, Stone Mountain, Georgia

GoodCents Solutions, an electrical firm of approximately 100 employees headquartered in Stone Mountain, Georgia, installs surge protection equipment and load management devices for electrical appliances such as heat pumps, air conditioners, and water heaters. As a contract service provider to utility companies in five states, GoodCents Solutions serves mostly residential customers who use the energy- and cost-saving devices to cycle off their appliances during peak use/peak cost hours.

Until recently, GoodCents Solutions dispatchers used a manual system of spreadsheets, ZIP Code lists, map books, and wall maps to locate several hundred service orders; assign each order to a service technician; and, ultimately, design a set of five routes (representing the following week's work) for each technician. The manual routing and scheduling process was quite time-consuming; dispatchers typically spent three or four person-days per week to build routes for their 12 service technicians.

"In the past, we manually sorted our service orders by ZIP Code, then assigned technicians to a cluster of ZIP Codes," says Mike Whalen, GoodCents Solutions vice president of operations. "This system was inefficient, especially considering that we now have some projects with 15 to 20 technicians."

ArcLogistics has helped GoodCents Solutions streamline the route planning process by easily handling service orders that require a specific appointment time. The appointment time is automatically taken into account when routes are built. Also, when a technician is scheduled to be out of work, a dispatcher simply needs to lock out the vehicle assigned to that technician to prevent it from being used.