In the first of two case studies, Antony Adshead reports
on how mobile technology helped BT Industries simplify its truck
maintenance scheduling and service system and save £1.7m a
year.
As the world's largest manufacturer of warehouse trucks, BT
Industries' business is all about helping its customers get things
to where they need to be. A major part of that involves keeping
those trucks rolling by responding to efficiently repair call-outs
and routine maintenance.
There are 1,500 maintenance technicians working in the field in
the company's European operations making about 5,000 service visits
a day - both planned and emergency. Scheduling these visits and
arranging for the delivery of parts has been dramatically
simplified using handheld devices connected via the mobile phone
network to customer and product data held in the firm's enterprise
resource planning system.
As a result, BT Industries has saved £1.7m a year in maintenance
costs Europe-wide and £1m by being able to reduce its offices from
seven to two in the UK.
It all started around 2000, after the company had implemented an
enterprise resource planning system from Intentia called Movex, and
it began to think about the possibilities of developing it to
provide mobile information.
The existing system of scheduling maintenance and repair staff
was heavily dependent on staff taking calls, manually checking to
see which technicians were best suited to the job, contacting the
technician and arranging for the correct parts to be sent to the
customer location - all of which was done by phone. Such was the
amount of phone time taken up by this process that customers would
often get an engaged signal when calling BT Industries' service
centre.
"Taking and making calls and back-office checks used to occupy
the bulk of the time in the whole process," says Nick Duckworth,
after sales manager at BT Industries. "Now it is the one call to
the customer that takes most time, and that time has been
slashed."
Since the implementation of the system, BT Industries knows
exactly what products a customer owns, when scheduled maintenance
is due and what parts are most likely to be needed to service the
truck.
"When the customer signs the initial contract we also draw up a
service level agreement. These service levels are entered into
Movex and when a maintenance event becomes due the information is
automatically transferred to the appropriate technician," says
Duckworth.
When an event is impending or a customer request for service
comes in by phone, the most suitable service technician is selected
according to records from the service level agreement held in
Movex.
The technician is equipped with a ruggedised Intermec handheld
with GSM or GPRS connection that is synchronised three or four
times a day. When he does so he receives comprehensive information
about the customer's trucks, their service history and
instructions, as well as checklists that are used to document what
has been done. Parts are also sent out as required.
In dealing with a repair the system accounts for forthcoming
scheduled maintenance and notifies the technician of that too. More
cost savings result from being able to carry out repair and
maintenance work simultaneously. Then, when servicing or repairs
are completed, the customer's approval is logged directly into the
system via the handheld.
As well as the scheduling and the servicing processes being
simplified, the system is also sped up by including an invoicing
function based on what the technician has entered into the
handheld.
This means that there is seldom a shortage of spare parts, and
stock levels held locally in vehicles and at the firm's central
depots have been reduced because usage of parts is constantly
monitored, instead of suffering the time lag that paper-based and
manual entry systems used to produce.
To date, the system has been close to an unqualified success.
"We have reduced call receiving and dispatch activity by 50% and
increased business activity by 25%," says Duckworth.
Infrastructure manager Patrik Carlsson says, "We expect that our
entire investment will pay for itself in a year. In addition, our
service presence will increase, and we will be perceived as more
professional."
The first phase of the implementation was the selection of
processes to be incorporated into the system. The decision was
taken to design the best possible business process first and then
develop software to suit, says Duckworth.
"A project group was formed with members from three countries
which agreed to use a common service process. A first release was
implemented on a trial basis in three countries and only small
adjustments were needed before it was rolled out to 11 more."
An example of where the system was adapted to suit ways of
working was in printing out documents for customers at service
visits. Obviously carrying a printer around was going to further
burden the technician and access to a customer's printer could not
be guaranteed.
E-mail was considered as a solution, but among the supermarket
customers who form a major part of BT Industries' business, e-mail
use is not common in warehouse areas. Fax machines are, however, so
the system was developed to print off customer documents to their
fax.
Development was carried out by BT Industries' IT partner Sogeti,
which devised the Movex field service functionality in the back-end
and on the Pocket PC-powered Intermec PDAs.
Technicians usually synchronise four times a day. In the UK they
connect via Vodafone's GSM or GPRS networks to Movex, which runs on
OS400 on IBM iSeries machines via a Windows 2000 server.
The Intermec handhelds support GSM and GPRS. Being ruggedised
was an attraction for reasons of everyday use, but also for device
security. "They are so obviously not consumer devices that they are
less likely to be a target for theft. In fact, the only problem we
have had at all is one technician who left one on the roof of the
van and the vehicle behind ran it over," says Duckworth.
Apart from such minor incidents, the BT Industries team
considers the roll-outs so far to be a success and have plans to
implement the system in Greece later this year.