Alpine Energy is a New Zealand electrical distribution company responsible for owning and maintaining the electricity network that powers over 33,500 homes and businesses in South Canterbury, New Zealand.
Alpine Energy is an essential lifeline service, contributing to the growth and prosperity of the Canterbury region and New Zealand’s transition to a low-carbon economy.
What would take a significant amount of time on site now takes about a minute. Fulcrum has made a big difference.
Michael Dickerson, Innovation Lead
Alpine Energy
Alpine Energy’s field operations span asset inspection, vegetation management, and earth resistance testing, work where data accuracy, crew efficiency, and system integration are all business-critical.
When Alpine Energy decided to upgrade to the latest ArcGIS platform, it meant that certain field capture applications would be deprecated. The team saw this as an opportunity for process improvement, and set out to rethink how field operations were managed.
The migration to Fulcrum began within a fixed timeframe as part of Alpine Energy’s ArcGIS upgrade. The GIS go-live date was set, which meant that the field data capture applications would cease to operate on that same day. “We’d been looking at potential alternatives for a while before we decided on the upgrade,” said Michael Dickerson, Innovation Lead. “It just accelerated that decision.”
The initial scope covered three applications: earth resistance testing, defect capture, and vegetation management. Vegetation management was the most complex, covering the full lifecycle of managing vegetation along feeder lines. It was also where existing processes needed the most refinement.
Before Fulcrum, getting a crew out the door for any kind of routine work was a time-consuming process. Vegetation to be surveyed and earth banks to be tested were pulled from the ERP, and the GIS team then had to build map books, printed reference documents linking earth banks to assets or trees to feeders. “The GIS department was trying to juggle everything amongst their other work, and sometimes creating those map books took two to three days,” said Dickerson. Depending on the job, a single map book could consume anywhere from one to eight hours of GIS staff time. With Fulcrum, the manual work is gone entirely.
“We just dispatch those assets straight through to Fulcrum and the map is created instantaneously,” said Dickerson. “That is a massive change for us from a dispatch perspective.” The transition also gave Alpine Energy room to improve how field transactions were handled without disrupting broader data processes.
The change that made the biggest difference to field crews was in how new trees are captured during vegetation surveys. When a crew member identified a new tree near the network, the process previously required manually logging the tree, assigning it to a feeder, finding the closest pole, creating an address, and entering all of it into the system.
Fulcrum automated the entire sequence. When a crew member creates a tree record at their
current location, Fulcrum queries the asset database, identifies the closest available pole, and populates the required fields automatically. “What would have taken a significant amount of time on site now takes about a minute. It has made a big difference,” said Dickerson.
Because field crews select assets from a structured database rather than typing anything in, the data that comes back is clean from the start. “Field crews aren’t looking for complicated tools, so the easier you make it for them, the better,” said Zane Cirule, GIS Applications Support Analyst. “Their feedback about Fulcrum has been great.”
Earth resistance testing presented its own challenges. Earth banks aren’t always easy to locate, and a single earth bank often services multiple assets. Matching them correctly required working through paper map books and reconciling data manually before crews could go out.
With Fulcrum, all assigned assets for a given quarter are loaded directly onto crew tablets with accurate location data. When a crew member is ready to move to the next site, they tap the asset and launch Google directions from within Fulcrum. “They just click on it, and Fulcrum takes them straight to the site. It saves a lot of time,” said Dickerson.
Accuracy improvements in the field also had a downstream effect. With manual data entry, GIS staff would spend time reviewing and validating incoming data before records could be used.
With Fulcrum, field crews select assets from a structured database, ensuring data is accurate from the moment it is captured. “If something needs attention, we get an alert and it takes about a minute to resolve,” said Dickerson.
Field photo management has also moved into Fulcrum, eliminating a separate process for the GIS team. “The GIS team has a lot more capacity now,” said Dickerson. “That has freed them up for higher-value work.”
Alpine Energy went into the rollout expecting Fulcrum to serve as a field system of record, with the ERP handling defect management internally. The platform quickly proved valuable beyond that scope. “The information is so good in Fulcrum, we’re managing defects internally as well,” said Dickerson. “Because that data is accurate, the team has higher trust in it and finds it easier to access and act on.”
Dickerson pointed to usability as a key driver of internal adoption: “You log in to Fulcrum and you can see all the records, you can filter. The ease of use and the speed at which you can do things in Fulcrum makes all the difference.”
The integration between Fulcrum and the ERP runs automatically, with field transactions captured in Fulcrum and data pushed to relevant systems without manual reconciliation. Fulcrum now manages the full lifecycle of vegetation management, with static asset information updated in other systems as needed. Whilst defect capture and earth resistance testing currently use Fulcrum only for data capture, this will also move to full lifecycle management in due course.
Internal adoption has been a welcome development, with office staff and support teams taking up licenses alongside field crew. “While the field benefits were clear from day one, the internal productivity gains have been even greater than we expected,” said Dickerson.
With the first phase complete and handed off for continuous improvement, Dickerson turned his attention to getting more out of the platform.
One of the first architectural decisions was to use app-specific workflows throughout rather than relying on generic webhooks. “We use workflows for everything because every app has different needs,” said Dickerson.
That same deliberate approach extended to how the team builds new apps. Maintaining form consistency across a growing Fulcrum footprint was a priority, so Dickerson built a custom tool using the Claude and Fulcrum APIs to automate the entire build process.
“I’ve got two API connections, one to Claude and one to Fulcrum,” said Dickerson. “I can load a template with the structure I want, evaluate the form and the JSON within the app, and when I’m happy, I push it across to Fulcrum.”
Each new app loads into a development environment first for testing before promoting to production, ensuring every app is structured exactly the way Alpine Energy needs it. For Dickerson, the first phase was just the foundation. “I’m super excited to see how far we can take it,” he said. “Now we can build on it.”
Working with professional services to configure the initial build, Alpine Energy tested the boundaries
of what Fulcrum could do. “The support has been amazing,” said Dickerson. “We made use of professional services as well, and they were great. I like to push things to the limit, so I was throwing some real curveballs, and they were very patient.”
For Dickerson, the relationship with Fulcrum has mattered as much as the product itself. “What I am really happy about is that the Fulcrum team is very open to suggestions and taking things on and having a discussion,” said Dickerson. “It’s not a no. It’s more like, let’s see how we can add this to the roadmap.”
Alpine Energy turned hours of manual work into a one-minute process with Fulcrum. Request a free custom demo to see what’s possible for your operations.
