At Zinfra, what we do matters. That’s why our teams take great pride in being the safest and most effective field force contractors in the electricity and gas infrastructure market. Our people live our vision of becoming your leading and trusted delivery partner in energy through always looking to identify and champion improved ways of working.
The Zinfra’s Innovation Award Scheme is designed to recognise and celebrate our people who have demonstrated innovative thinking across our business in safety, service delivery, products and business process improvements.
We are proud to announce the 2024 June award winners and runner-up from our office submissions.
Ben Marriot, Field Tester
Innovation: Pole-Top Devices Framework
While a trainee, Ben collaborated across teams to implement an overarching framework that articulated for all teams the process of the roll-out of pole top devices.
While each team effectively knew and delivered their activity they didn’t have oversight of the process from beginning to end, including the responsibility, or interdependencies of all teams.
“For the current scale of the pole top device roll-out, a system to support the roll-out was required to ensure Zinfra could deliver a high-quality service. With out the implementation of the framework, disconnection between teams could have exacerbated into negative impacts on project delivery,” says Ben Marriott, Field Tester.
The framework allows project managers a complete overview of the pole top device roll-out and supports work teams in understanding how each task relates to another work group, making the overall process more successful.
“As a by-product of creating the framework, new standards were created in how to name field devices and what to do when existing devices need upgrading,” Ben says.
Congratulations Ben for delivering this first-class improvement in the roll-out of pole top devices for our clients - the framework is an improved business process which has saved time, reduced project risks, and allowed for a higher quality of service.
Michael Houterman, Business Resilience Lead
Innovation: Digitised process for residential listings during outages
After learning of the challenges experienced by site controllers during gas outages, Michael re-organised and digitised the process for make safe and relights.
Prior to the simplified process, the gas control room would provide site controllers and their field teams with a single spreadsheet to facilitate the make safe and relights process. The printing of the paper listings using the single spreadsheet was labour-intensive, often being performed from the site controllers vehicle and cumbersome for field teams to record critical information especially during high winds or wet weather.
“The new digitised process produces and delivers street listings to site controllers for downloading within a few minutes. Allowing field teams to commence the make safe process quickly, instead of waiting for paper listings for reference,” said Michael.
The automated process has delivered huge benefits to all teams working on gas outages. The digitised approach is more accessible to more people, has removed administrative labour and allows transparency between the control room, site controller, and the Emergency Management Team with a live view of the completion rates of make safes and relights. The overall net effect is reduced times for customers off gas supply.
This process meaningfully impacted site controllers, field technicians and importantly allowed Zinfra to support affected communities in times of need.
The Zinfra Innovation Award Scheme is open to team members all year round. Following a selection process by our Awards Selection Committee, the winners and runners-up are announced in June and December. We look forward to profiling our December award recipients at the end of 2024.
