Following a technology injection in February, this week facilities management company Morris and Spottiswood announced that the change had increased the capacity of its residential maintenance team by over a third. The installation consisted of Orange Fleet Link with Service Link - these are Orange branded versions of Aeromark's mobile workforce technology, a Bedford based company.
Although members of this mobile workforce have always worked as efficiently as humanly possible, Craig Murie, operations director of the maintenance divisions at Morris and Spottiswood explained how these call and workflow innovations enabled them to make a leap in productivity:
"We have a multi-trade mobile reactive workforce of 40 engineers. Prior to installing this new system, our workforce was completing a respectable average of three jobs per engineer each day. We realised we had hit an efficiency ceiling using the standard combination of phones, texts, emails and faxes to communicate.
"With Aeromark's fully integrated technology, the whole process speeds up - the engineers now complete between four and five jobs a day, on average. The need for daily journeys to a local branch has been removed, which means less time wasted, increased customer availability and less petrol from reduced travel and route optimisation. As well as the reduction in carbon emissions, we are now moving towards a paperless system, so there is an environmental saving too."
The Service Link Service Management system is fully integrated with Aeromark's Orange Fleet Link vehicle tracking system to provide true visibility and accurate measurement. The new paperless environment includes individual customer portals where third parties and stakeholders have access to project status information. This ability has become a necessity for many tenders as it helps avoid misunderstanding when more than two organisations are involved.
"The technology is a smart investment for companies which operate a mobile workforce because it provides instant payback. It reduces the cost per job and increases the customer's cashflow because it automatically flags job completions, invoice timings and payments. The upshot is revenue can be increased without changing headcount.
"Our team are taking things a step further, looking for additional system enhancements which will help fine tune the performance of aspects unique to Morris and Spottiswood," explained Roger Marks, managing director at Aeromark.