Facilities management company Managed Support Services (MSS) has invested in an integrated real-time system to manage its team of mobile engineers. The system gives full visibility of the engineers, their jobs and vehicles live on screen. The Masternaut innovation helps MSS provide reactive and planned maintenance to customers throughout the UK, including The Co-op, Thomas Cook and the Manchester property management firm Bruntwood Estates.
The system is based on Masternaut's real-time vehicle tracking solution fitted to the company's fleet of 85 engineers' vans and Three X mobile software, which runs on rugged PDAs. Seamless integration with the MSS back office system Nucleus ensures that there is no duplication of data, with jobs being sent direct to engineers' PDAs. Being paperless, the system enables much faster administration and allows quicker turnaround of electronic paperwork and invoices, which improves the company's cash flow.
With the system, MSS reportedly exceeds industry standard levels of reactive service performance for specialist emergency support and out-of-hours calls. It can rapidly identify the nearest available appropriately skilled engineer to improve first time fix rates, as well as plan the most effective route to provide accurate expected times of arrival, make best use of engineering resources and reduce the company's carbon footprint.
Real-time activity is monitored on a large plasma screen using VisuLive, Masternaut's unique performance management solution. The customer service team uses this for an instant view of job progress and allows them to see whether they are complying with their service level agreements. It also helps with responding to urgent calls from customers as the team can see who is available to attend the call out.
"The integrated system gives us full control of our resources and enables us to be very responsive. It gives online, real-time visibility of our engineers and vehicles, wherever they may be and this is extremely beneficial when we need to react quickly," says Mike Cox, MSS Group IT Director. "The mobile engineer software enables paperless administration of jobs as these are sent direct to engineers on their PDAs. They in turn use the PDAs to sign off jobs and communicate any additional details direct to HQ. There's no double data entry and this means improved workflow and faster processing of invoices too. We save time and increase efficiency with this technology."
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