13-14 Analyze SourceGas’s problems with its old system. What management, organization, and technology factors were responsible for these problems? What was the business impact of these problems? SourceGas is a utility headquartered in Golden, Colorado providing natural gas service to over 413,000 customers in Arkansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming. The company has over 1,100 employees and operates nearly 18,000 miles of natural gas transmission and distribution pipeline covering a 332,437-square-mile area—about half the size of Alaska.

The number of work orders (authorizing specific work or repairs to be done) processed per mile traveled is a key performance indicator for utility companies, especially SourceGas. SourceGas’s territory includes many large rural areas where re-routing work orders incurs very heavy fuel, maintenance, and other operational costs. The more work orders that can be processed per mile traveled, the lower the cost.

SourceGas’s predecessor had installed a mobile information system in 2000 to dispatch approximately 500,000 work orders to approximately 500 field technicians equipped with mobile devices.

However, this work order and dispatch system was starting to show its age, and the work order and dispatch processes required too much manual effort. All work was dispatched manually, and there were no systematized scheduling priorities, making it difficult for service technicians to consistently be assigned workloads that were aligned with business objectives.