November 18, 2014

Barton County Electric Cooperative Enhances Customer Service

Barton County Electric Cooperative Enhances Customer Service with FuturaOMS

Barton County EC in Lamar, Missouri, selects Futura Systems to provide their new Outage Management System.

After an extensive comparison of GIS merchants, Futura was clearly the vendor with the answers for Barton County EC located in Lamar, Missouri. Futura’s seamless integration with the co-op’s current software systems from NISC speeds customer information searches, quickly identifying callers who are in existing outage areas and even publishing outage data to Barton County Electric Cooperative’s website. To further improve the integration, Futura developers were able to create a custom interface with KAMO Power for after-hours call center integration, which gives Barton County EC alternative outage dispatching with an agility that is enviable.

“When a member calls in with an outage, FuturaOMS enables our operations department to pinpoint where to send the crews to restore service. Getting our crews to the trouble spot quickly results in shorter outage times which has improved member satisfaction. In the past we sometimes had to check several miles of line to find the cause of the outage,” says Monte Parker, Information Technology at Barton County Electric Cooperative.

Barton County EC now has a central hub for input from multiple sources, such as AMI, IVR, CIS, and SCADA. This pivotal communications tool offers automated outage predictions, network tracing and switching to help pinpoint outages down to a single device failure. The new Futura system communicates with Barton County EC’s existing systems in real time, with two-way integration, giving utility employees dependable, current outage information almost as quickly as it occurs.

Providing up-to-date, accurate outage information is important to continue providing the level of service Barton County EC’s members have grown accustomed to. With a move to the dynamic software offered by Futura, Barton County EC further enhances their levels of customer service.

About Barton County Electric Cooperative

Barton County Electric Cooperative serves approximately 6,400 members across Barton, Vernon, Jasper and Dade counties in southwest Missouri. Since its beginnings in 1937, Barton County EC has built and maintains over 1,800 miles of line. A Touchstone Energy Cooperative, Barton County EC is headquartered in Lamar, Missouri. Learn more at: www.bartonelectric.com.