Building a mobile workforce
- Posted:
- 16:39 14 Jan 2005
- Topics:
- PDA & Hand-helds | Mobile & Wireless Networking | Internet Portals & Search | Web Browsers
When a building services firm wanted to monitor its
activities and stock levels and gain an overall view of the
business, it put its supplier to the task of developing a system
that could be used by its staff and customers alike. Helen Beckett
reports
Emergency building contractors Response Maintenance
& Building Services won the BCS Business Achievement Award in
2004 in the small business section for its real-time, always-on
business scheduling system. Innovative technology is just part of
the success story. The application has delivered real benefits to
the business, stripping out £250,000 in costs a year and
turning the building repairs company into a finely tuned customer
services organisation.
A huge part of this success is down to managing director Andy
Cornaby. Disillusioned with an industry where the customer
constantly wants more for less along with a chronic shortage of
skilled tradesmen, he was watching his profits drop year on
year.
"From day one we have always used technology," he says. When the
business was founded this was pretty basic: a word processor, CB
radios in the vans and pagers to call drivers to their vans. Mobile
phones were not universal and up until three years ago he ran a
paper-based office where jobs were scheduled on a dry whiteboard
stuck to the wall. Cornaby started the business in 1994 with his
financial director, two staff and four tradesmen and within three
months this increased to four staff and 20 tradesmen.
However, trading conditions for the repair and maintenance sector
have become more demanding with clients looking for ever better
service at cheaper prices. Labour costs have risen as quality
tradesmen are in decline following the lapse of apprenticeship
schemes over the past 20 years.
Cornaby wanted his Wolverhampton-based company to manage resources,
labour and stock much more efficiently to increase margins and
provide better customer service. This could only be accomplished
through real-time deployment of parts and labour to jobs. "I wanted
to be able to monitor the purchase orders, the delivery notes and
the individual jobs or tradesmen at the touch of a button," he
says.
Relying on a manual system of whiteboards, jobsheets and a squad of
administrators to input tradesmen's handwritten notes costs time
and money. If job sheets went missing or workers were off sick,
reporting could be delayed by up to a week. "Although this was just
about acceptable, it was not efficient," says Cornaby. Idle stock
and dead time were also an unwelcome feature of the business. "We
carried about £95,000 of stock that was never or seldom used,"
he says.
Worst of all, it was virtually impossible to get an
up-to-the-minute view of the business. It needed a "fast, reactive
response service" says Martin Taylor, managing director of
web-based software and browser interface specialists Impact
Applications, developer of the company's mobile system. "The
business was giving clients 24-hour response time agreements and
was meeting them by the skin of its teeth," he says. The
application had to be in real time.
Cornaby wanted to equip his staff with personal digital assistants
that could transfer live information between the field engineers
and the back-office via the internet. Additionally, customers,
stock controllers and administrators would be able to log on to the
company's system to check the live status of activities including
customer enquiries, jobs, appointments, workforce scheduling,
labour hours, stock control and health and safety advice.
Given the immaturity of handheld devices and wireless technology at
the time, this was a bold vision, says Taylor. Most logistics
companies were deploying batch-synchronisation resource management
systems in the field, which entailed handheld devices installed
with client software that could be periodically synchronised with
back-end systems. This was achieved either by plugging into a
desktop and synchronising the data or doing updates over
GPRS.
In May 2001 Cornaby hired Impact to implement his ideas. He had
already designed a logical schema as he was keen to automate the
tried and tested processes.
Impact had never developed an application for a PDA before and this
was the biggest job the company had since start-up, but Impact and
Cornaby worked together to devise a specification. Although the
zero-client architecture proposed by Impact was technically
pioneering, it had the advantage of being cheaper on a number of
counts.
"The inherent cost of delivering access through a web browser is
lower," says Taylor. "The cost of supporting a thin client in the
field is greater, because if it is damaged or lost, you lose data
as well as having to replace the software and hardware client. If
you break a zero client device, it is just a case of replacing the
battery or the device."
Impact is a Wolverhampton University incubated company that
specialises in web-based software and browser interfaces. Taylor
used open source software and MySQL, PHP for scripting and Apache
web server. The company had to look into resizing screens for a PDA
and had to research wireless connectivity. It chose Symbol's PPT
2837 Pocket PCs, at £1,500 per device, for Response's 30
workers in the field.
Taylor says, "When you are developing you are always coming up
against things you have not done before. The great thing about
using open source is having a developer community to talk to. They
have a free spirit about helping their peers. We always encourage
developers to spend a few hours a week on the notice boards helping
people with their problems and we get it back by the spadeful. You
rarely get a straight answer but you do get useful insights."
The finished system consists of three core components: the customer
extranet, the mobile interface and the back-office, which controls
customer enquiries, jobs, appointments and workforce scheduling,
labour hours, stock control and health and safety advice. Workers
could use the PDA to log appointments, report progress and collect
signatures in real time, in the field.
"We had to make sure the handheld devices were powerful enough to
support opening an internet address - any pocket PC-based PDA can
do this now - and that the speed of wireless access was fast enough
to support this," says Taylor.
Security was perhaps the biggest concern, as any connection had to
be fully secured. SSL 128-bit encryption was ideal, but this was
not included in the first version of Pocket PC. Mobile supplier
Orange helped Impact source a supplier that provided SSL capability
but by the time the system went live, the next generation of
devices included support.
When development began, GPRS was still an immature technology and
the first problem was whether it was feasible to use. In
particular, the lack of optimisation for data and thus the
relatively high occurrence of dropped connections was
considered.
"If you want to send large files such as video or pictures, GPRS
might be something you would look at. But for frequent small
packets of data it is not an issue," says Taylor. Cornaby was happy
to trade the odd, dropped connection for the big commercial
benefits he believed he was set to gain.
Similarly, Impact had to look outside for specialist software when
Cornaby, in pursuit of a real-time, paperless system, insisted on
the capture of digital signatures. "What was the point in having a
customer sign a paper docket?" he asks. No software existed for
PDAs and their suppliers Orange and Symbol came up trumps in
helping them source suitable software. This was installed in the
permanent memory of the phone at the nominal cost of £2.10 per
device.
Cornaby's determination that every aspect of the business, even the
signatures, had to be in real time delayed the roll-out of the
system and meant that version control had to be tight. The initial
24-week project grew to 18 months. "We developed function by
function, so changes to discrete pieces did not alter the others.
There may have been between 20 to 30 versions to each function.
Because we worked so hard at the outset to get the specification
right, features were never wrong. We just took them further than we
had originally planned," says Taylor.
Both parties were satisfied with the pioneering project and
achieved real-time updates over GPRS. Cornaby has cut costs and the
business is in good shape for the future.
Having developed the product together, Response Maintenance &
Building Services and Impact Applications are marketing it under
the name Impact Response. Under the partnership, Cornaby has also
agreed to act as a reference site and adviser on future version
changes.
"Contractors get a terrible name - the public has seen the cowboys
on TV," he says. "Now all our transactions are transparent to our
customers and they can see what they are getting and at what cost."
But Cornaby remains a pragmatist - the dry whiteboard is tucked
away in a corner, just in case.
At a glance
The system: enables information about jobs,
appointments and workforce scheduling, labour hours, stock control
and health and safety advice to be remotely accessed and amended.
It consists of three core components:
The back-office: A Hewlett-Packard Proliant server
and HP PCs host a bespoke work management and scheduling
system.
Mobile interface: Tradespeople, kitted out with
Symbol Pocket PCs can access back-office systems over the GPRS
mobile network at the click of the button.
Customer extranet: A layer of scheduling
information can be accessed by customers from a web browser.
