THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 27, 1996 TAG: 9609270511
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 80 lines
Chalk up the meter reader as the next worker to be endangered by Corporate America's endless quest for cost-saving automation.
Virginia Power said Thursday that over the next three years it will shift nearly a half-million meters at customers' homes and businesses, including 125,000 in South Hampton Roads, to a system that uses computers and radio transmitters to track electricity use.
The change, affecting nearly one of every four Virginia Power customers, is part of a sweeping overhaul of customer-service and field operations at the state's largest electric utility.
Richmond-based Virginia Power, a unit of Dominion Resources Inc., said it will spend more than $100 million by 1998 on technological innovations to improve customer service and reduce outages. The utility said it expects to quickly recoup the investment, however, partly because automation and more efficient work-scheduling will reduce its work force.
The changes announced Thursday at Virginia Power's commercial operations group, the utility's largest, are part of an ongoing ``re-engineering'' of the company called Vision 2000. Since that re-engineering began earlier last year, Virginia Power has eliminated about 1,400 of its 11,000 jobs.
So far, the commercial operations group - which includes linemen, customer-service representatives and meter readers - has been largely unscathed. But Larry M. Girvin, a Virginia Power senior vice president, said Thursday that cutbacks in the group are inevitable and could be announced as early as next month.
``Clearly, this technology will have an impact on meter readers,'' Girvin said, before showing off some of the new devices at his group's training center in Chesterfield County near Richmond. But he said it's too early to predict how many of the utility's 280 human meter readers will be replaced by the computerized type.
Girvin said automated meter reading and a new system of on-board computers for Virginia Power service vehicles are the two most expensive elements of his group's planned new-technology expenditures. Because it expects to recover the costs quickly, Virginia Power will not seek a customer rate increase, he said.
In every case, the planned changes will improve customer service, Girvin said. He predicted that 15 percent fewer customers will be affected by outages. That's because the utility will be more aggressive in removing threats like branches that overhang power lines and because it will install so-called step-down transformers to lower the electricity voltage in trouble-prone cable runs, he said.
When outages occur, other technological innovations like on-board computers will help roving repair crews get service restored 20 to 30 percent faster, Girvin said. Crews will have easier access to relevant information and can be dispatched more quickly, he said.
The biggest improvements being promised will be in the handling of customer calls.
When recent Hurricane Fran knocked out power to 540,000 Virginia Power customers, the utility's three phone centers, including one in Norfolk, were swamped. Girvin said during one 24-hour period the centers handled 110,000 calls - more than twice the previous record in a day's time. Still, many callers couldn't get through and Virginia Power was stung by complaints, particularly in the Richmond area.
To solve the problem, Girvin said Virginia Power will replace its series of local phone numbers with one high-capacity toll-free number that will work for all the centers, plus enhance a system that lets callers report trouble by navigating through a series of automated messages. As a result the utility will increase its call-handling capacity more than 20-fold, he said.
Automating meter reading will help improve its crisis response, Girvin said, because it will enable Virginia Power to use its radio-transmitting technology to instantly survey all meters tied into the new system. That will give the utility a quick read on the location and extensiveness of outages.
Virginia Power isn't a leader in utilizing such technologies. Dozens of other electric, gas and water utilities around the country already use automated meter reading.
Girvin said his group intends to keep aggressively chasing new technologies.
He said automated meter reading may even lead to a slew of new optional time-of-day electricity rate schedules for customers, including homeowners. Through radio signals from each meter, the system is capable of tracking electricity use on a minute-by-minute basis, he noted. by CNB