Workforce Management

Field service management

by Mark Rowe

An installer reports boosted productivity by going digital with field service management software. Since deploying the BigChange job management platform, Trustee has had real-time reporting from service engineers using mobile devices linked to live vehicle tracking. Trustee Fire and Security dates from 1978 and is based in Orpington. The company covers domestic and commercial and offers fire and intruder alarms; CCTV, access control, automatic gates, fabrication and emergency lighting. Two years ago Trustee realised that their ageing legacy system could not cope.

Trustee director Nick Toomey, pictured, says: “We work in an industry bound by a lot of health and safety legislation and is broadly behind the times when it came to digital working; it was still an industry burdened with paperwork. We knew that moving to a real-time digital reporting system was the future but finding a suitable system proved difficult. BigChange proved to be by far the best option and offers tremendous potential as the platform to transform this industry.”

BigChange brings together customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, live tracking, field resource management, financial management, and business intelligence into one platform. Trustee run a fleet of vehicles servicing clients across the south-east of England. Engineers have rugged tablets for managing their jobs and reporting; the BigChange platform synchronises mobile devices and the central customer relationship management (CRM), so Trustee can see all jobs. Trustee particularly like the automated scheduling and routing, for best allocation of resources, backed with useful management information, such as the calculated cost of each job. It’s also two-way integrated with Xero accounts software.

Toomey says: “BigChange has enabled us to eliminate paperwork and completely digitally transform the way we work. That has led to productivity gains across the office and field service operations of around 25 per cent. However, it’s customer service where the greatest benefits are being realised. Customers are very impressed with the provision of instantly updated data from our engineers and automated communications.”

On the fleet side, Trustee’s engineers use their tablets to record their vehicle safety checks and tracking provides safe driving statistics, besides keeping customer services informed of the location and progress of all engineers. BigChange software guides engineers with workflows to ensure procedures are followed and all data is complete. Toomey described it as ‘a great business tool as we can see everything going on, in real-time and 24/7 from anywhere by just connecting online’. He added that it’s broken down traditional IT barriers ‘and we’ll be able to expand freely whether it be through organic growth or acquisition’.

Visit: www.trusteefiresecurity.com.

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