Ikeja Electric is the largest Nigerian power distribution company. Headquartered in the capital Lagos, Ikeja Electric provides energy and power to various homes and industries (roughly about 1 million customers). Ikeja Electric is committed to delivering efficient and sustainable power supply through investments in new technology, infrastructure upgrades, and human capital development.

"Going from a manual process to a digital one with MobiWork has increased revenue by 85% in a 2-year period."
- Samuel Whenu, Head IT

Key Challenges: Tracking Field Staff and Worker Accountability

The utility company that they run now used to be a government run company, with little or no technology at all. With over 3,200 employees and counting, it was virtually impossible to keep track of the field staff and there was no way to hold people accountable, and no way to know that the tech is actually doing company work rather than personal work. They couldn't track field guys in real time, let alone at all, which meant they couldn't ascertain a high enough level of customer service.

Results: Technological Innovation and Enhanced Customer Service

In the last 5 years, Ikeja Electric spent a lot of resources to put into technology, which is how they got to know about MobiWork. Now they can track field activity and make sure that their field guys do what they are hired to do, they can make sure that their customers are getting serviced. The major difference between Ikeja and their competitor is that they lead in terms of innovation in all areas of their business of which technology is one. "We are innovative. We try new things, things that have never been done before in our sector." Their main success factor as a utility company is to reduce what they call "technology commercial distribution losses" by 5% every year over a 5-year period. This was put in place in 2013, meeting that goal in 2018, (congratulations Ikeja Electric) and continuing to present day with an ultimate goal to reduce that 5% by an additional 10%.

Customer service representatives are supposed to visit each customer they have at least once a month. If they have 200 customers, they are expected to make 200 visits. They need to document what they do when they are there, check to ensure that conditions of service to the customer is adequate, and check if the customer is properly connected and making sure that all customers connected are actually paying for the power they are using. Before MobiWork, the field representative would come back to the office after making their rounds to fill out their field reports form to report everything that they are responsible for doing, which is hard to remember after the whole day. It was mostly word of mouth; there was no way of documenting and validating all of their visits, so they just had to be trusted.

"The reaction to MobiWork was exciting. Because of the opportunity to try before you buy, we did the trial and it was obvious that it was a solution that would meet our needs." Ikeja Electric now uses MobiWork for the location tracking features, geotagging, and electronic paper forms. They report activity in real-time by matching the activity form at the customer location by using coordinates to confirm that they are the customers location. Going from a manual process to a digital one using smartphone technology to drive operations has helped increased their revenue by 85% in a 2-year period (and 80% more productive overall).