GIS and Augmented Reality applied to Field Service made available to digital multiutilities

Workforce Management is a business sector that can definitely benefit from the use of new technologies. Nevertheless, the innovation process had so far been slowed down by the considerable number of resources operating on field and by the risks involved with equipping them with mobile consumer devices (they would surely end up breaking, loosing, stealing …). In the last couple of years, a handful of visionary ICT companies, backed by far-sighted customers, decided to revert the conservative trend and introduce up-to-date technology, thus advancing innovation in the WFM process. As a result, technicians have been provided with mobile consumer devices (iPad, smartphones, …) and wearables (smart glasses, smartphones, …). Furthermore, Augmented Reality and GIS capabilities have been integrated in the mobile APP to offer the maximum support possible when on field. Indoor and outdoor positioning and navigation, off-road navigation, shape recognition, drones, and new frontiers such as Microsoft HoloLens, Kinect and Google Tango, are the near future of mobile technology. Beside the revolution undergone by field technologies, sophisticated scheduling Geoalgorithms have been added server side, in order to optimize the agenda of technicians, as well as amazing GIS tools and connectors to main ERPs and CRMs (e.g. SAP, IBM Maximo, Salesforce Dynamics, …). The purpose of the present paper is to outline the state of the art of the aforementioned technologies applied to WFM and made available to utilities. A case history of Italgas and the project GAStoGO is also included.