The Challenge

Bracknell Forest Services (BFS) gas maintenence engineers, tasked with service jobs originated from the BFS call centre, visit Bracknell Forest Borough Council tenants in order to service, repair, and carry out safety checks on gas appliances in council-owned properties. Originally these jobs were allocated to the engineers on paper job cards. Once the job was completed the field engineer would request the client to sign the job card and then take the completed form back to the Call Center for data capturing and processing.

The Solution

Using mobilegas™ (MGAS) a derivative of mobilejobcard™, and Integr8or™ Mobile Application Server, on a mobile device/SmartPhone, the engineer downloads electronic job cards at the start of the day simply by tapping on a button marked ‘Get Jobs’. These jobs have been entered into the MGAS call centre server via a web-based user interface and stored, ready for the engineer to connect and request/download his pre-assigned jobs and eliminating the costly need of ‘voice calling’ the data through to the engineer. The engineer now completes the assigned job and enters the relevant answers into the pre-defined fields of MGAS. Once completed,the engineer and client sign-off the job in pre-defined fields on the device’s screen before tapping on ‘Send’ to push the completed job back to the call centre for processing, eliminating the need for additional data capturing. Once the data is received in the call centre, it is immediately available for viewing on the server, via a web-based browser.

The Benefits

The overall cost of a service call to the council is lowered through the reduction of cell phone calls from/to the BFS call centre. In addition, the need for the engineer to travel unnecessarily to the office to collect or drop off job cards is eliminated, as well as offering better management of the engineers who receive their daily task list in the morning.  This leads directly to other benefits, including:
•    The call centre staff are now free to do other administration and service support tasks further improving the image of BFS as a service-oriented organisation.
•    The image of BFS is enhanced as the engineers present a far more professional image to the clients.
•    The solution allows for one point of accountability, a more streamlined business process with the benefits of higher productivity both in front of the customer and in the back office as well as offering improvements in data integrity.
•    BFS also benefit from the ability to use a mobile solution without the risk of sensitive data being stored on mobile devices out of the office.
•    Return on investment is calculated to be achieved in just 3 months.