Andy Fox, Managing Director of APS explains the problem that the company set out to solve: "In order to maintain the highest levels of customer service, on which our success is built, we need to be able to respond rapidly to customer emergencies and breakdowns, and to carry out preventative maintenance in a timely manner. This means that information about an issue needs to be gathered and processed rapidly. As our engineer site visits rose to 150 a week, manually collating and processing the paper reports was causing a backlog of between two and three weeks, and resulting in customers chasing us for quotes."
Initially, APS introduced an IPAQ PDA solution, in conjunction with a service management database to ease the situation. But even this proved slow, cumbersome and unreliable.
Andy Fox continues: "It was taking our engineers 30 minutes to fill out a call on a PDA, and even then, they were limited to 250 characters and could not attach drawings, so inaccuracies were creeping in."
APS started to look for a better solution which would speed-up response times, increase efficiency and maximise the effectiveness of its engineers.
The Solution
APS turned to Digital Pen and Paper technology market leader, Destiny Wireless PLC, to help improve efficiency and maximise customer service. To ensure data accuracy and capture the required level of detail, Destiny helped APS to design three simple tick-box forms so that engineers could record which equipment had been tested, make notes and drawings of where to position critical security systems, or state what type of maintenance was required.
Computech IT services a specialist developer of Filemaker, designed a new service management database around the pen solution. Now at the click of a mouse a graphical display of the hand written pen form sheet embedded within the database is pulled up.
This has proved extremely useful in discussing works with clients when within minutes of the engineer leaving site. We can be looking at exactly the same information.
Using a Digital Pen, engineers can now capture and store the information from the hand-written forms, and then transmit it instantly through a GPRS connection via a mobile phone to a central computer. The data is then converted and saved as an electronic text file and integrated with the service management system designed specifically for APS.
"It is much quicker for engineers to raise a job and enter the details onto a form with a Digital pen. The engineer is on-site and can describe the job in front of him using an unlimited number of characters and drawings. The accuracy is dramatically improved, and because the information is transmitted electronically, the customer can keep the written copy, but the data can be processed and returned to the customer as a quote the same day," says Andy Fox.
It took six months to custom design the APS service management system in conjunction with the Digital Pen and Paper solution. Following a very successful pilot, the Digital Pens were rolled out in January 2006.
