It’s probably happened to us all. We’re given directions to a friend or colleague’s home in a remote area, and try as we might, we can’t find the location on our maps or apps.
For most of us, it’s an occasional annoyance. But for frontline CLP employees performing routine meter reading services everyday, confusing street numbers and vague addresses could cost them a huge amount of time and effort.
A solution is now at hand, and innovation is the key. In January 2020, CLP employees took the initiative and used the company’s Microsoft PowerApps software to develop Meter GPS Assistance – a new, simple, easy-to-operate app with zero development cost that allows frontline colleagues to obtain and record the precise GPS address of each meter.
CLP engineer Dennis Lee shares on his journey in developing the application. “Our team members worked together and adopted the Design Thinking methodology to understand the pain points encountered by our frontline colleagues. We went through many trials and prototypes before getting to the final product,” he says.
The Meter GPS Assistance case is one of the grand winners in CLP’s Grand Recognition programme, which is held every quarter to give credit to projects that have had a significant impact in raising levels of innovation and quality, improving safety and helping the company deliver its customer service promise. Entries demonstrate people-centric solutions, often self-initiated, that promote digitalisation, increase work efficiency and enhance customer experience.
To cultivate the people-centric innovation culture and agile mindsets, CLP introduces Design Thinking and data analytics as a creative problem-solving approach that often results in novel ways of collaborating and working across the company about two years ago.
Design Thinking is more than a tool. It helps teams identify pain points from the perspectives of customers or users and rethink current processes through the development of prototypes and user testing before finding solutions.
Over 4,000 employees of CLP Power in Hong Kong have completed Design Thinking training to equip themselves with the necessary basic skills. Further training is provided to those who have been nominated to lead or take part in innovation projects.
Design Thinking is only one of the many strategies that helps foster a culture of innovation. Driven by the knowledge that innovation is boundless and can bring unlimited possibilities, CLP has taken a series of steps to significantly expand its innovation culture since 2017.
It has provided an online platform for colleagues to share innovative ideas, held seminars to exchange innovative insights, arranged visits to organisations in the forefront of innovation, trained up culture ambassadors, set up an experience centre SmartHub@CLP to exhibit smart city and innovative solutions, and redesigned office spaces to create an enabling environment that cultivates employees’ creative thinking.
Building an innovation culture isn’t just about harnessing the latest technologies or creating ground-breaking inventions. At CLP, it is about co-creating on innovative and customer-centric solutions that bring about changes and create value for employees, customers, and the community at large.
