Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

Pervasic MobileOne Accelerator Housing Maintenance Solution Extends Back Office Functionality Out to the Field, Taking Mobility to New Levels

Bournemouth Borough Council has selected and deployed Pervasic’s MobileOne Accelerator Housing Maintenance Solution to mobilize its contractors, extend back office functionality out into the field, and move to real time stock replacement and electronic invoicing with selected key suppliers. Once fully deployed, the project will take mobility to new levels for the council.

With 5424 dwellings, Bournemouth Borough Council is responsible for the ongoing maintenance, scheduled repair and emergency call out needs of its social housing tenants. The Council employs a multi-trade workforce of approximately 30 people, as well as nine additional contractors, all with specialist trade skills in areas such as plumbing, electrics, gas and roofing. Pervasic’s solution replaces an old paper-based system with printed diary sheets.

“Housing Landlord Services were stretched to the limit with their workloads. This system increases staff productivity in the field and allows the department to expand its client base, accepting more work without additional office resources,” said Brett Holtom, Procurement and Project Manager for Bournemouth Borough Council. “On the old paper-based system, one job could generate between 15 to 20 sheets of paper to be filled out by the operatives and then re entered in the office to update the back office housing system. This data is entered by the call centre teams, vastly decreasing the time they could spend on the phone talking to customers. We are also investigating the use of pCards for high volume, low value transactions to further reduce paperwork in the finance team.”

Brett Holtom conducted an in-depth review of seven different suppliers in the mobilization arena and assigned a tender score to each vendor based on their market knowledge, technical strengths and insight into working with specific back-office systems.

“Pervasic came out ahead of any other vendor with a tender score of 9.8 out of 10,”added Holtom. “They quickly understood our requirements, had a strong technical background and have in-depth knowledge of linking back end systems to field mobility. They had a proven track record and provided us with a good value solution. With the old paper-based system, our operatives would have to come into the office every day to collect printed diary sheets – mobilizing the operatives to start their work from home will give us instant benefits and should allow us to fit in extra jobs per day. We’ve already implemented the Opti-Time scheduling system with our back office Northgate housing application and the move to dynamic scheduling is the next logical step.”

Phase One of deployment of the Pervasic solution will take place at the end of December 2007, with Pervasic’s MobileOne Accelerator Housing Maintenance solution being deployed on handhelds to 30 operatives. Phase Two of the project is scheduled to go live in Feb 2008, and will enable true mobile EDI, real time stock replacement and electronic invoicing with key suppliers.

“Once the EDI solution is fully deployed, we’ll be able to link directly with suppliers such as Jewson, Travis Perkins and Wolseley,” said Holtom. “There is no requirement for a full time procurement manager and we only keep a minimum amount of stock in our vans at any one time. The EDI functionality on the Pervasic handhelds will enable our workforce to automatically reorder directly from the field. At the moment, we have a team of five people processing more than 1,000 invoices a month from suppliers. Once this functionality is fully deployed, we will eliminate 80 percent of these paper based invoices.”

One of the key benefits of mobilizing through Pervasic’s MobileOne solution is the ability to streamline processes and increase productivity, particularly with regards to automating the process of job costing.

“We expect to see significant savings at the back end,” concluded Brett. “One of the main elements of concern for us is job costing. Previously, the workforce would drop off their paperwork at the end of each day with a time sheet and parts job. We then had an office based function that would factor how much labour and materials were required and then manually calculate the cost of each job. With Pervasic, the process of job costing is done automatically. We have been able to release the nine call centre staff back on the phones, rather than having to do data entry. There will also be lower processing costs on accounting for invoices that will be processed electronically, and the p-cards will take care of those high volume low value transactions that aren't on the system. And of course, we also have better scheduling with live, real time updates. We know our savings will come mainly from the back office. By centralizing our back office functions and essentially automating this functionality so it is pushed back out to the field, we will completely change the way we’ve been working. Before Pervasic, it had reached the point where we couldn’t accept anymore work without pulling in additional resources. We didn’t want to just throw additional people at the problem. We wanted to be smarter about how we solved the workload, and so far, we are extremely pleased with the results.”

Pending the successful rollout of the Pervasic MobileOne platform in Phase Two of the project, Bournemouth Borough Council will also be reviewing potential deployment other areas of the council where mobile field operatives are in use.

Pervasic’s MobileOne Accelerator Housing Maintenance Solution is a fully featured, multi-trade application, which runs on Pervasic’s industry-leading MobileOne® Platform. With typical time to deployment in less than 12 weeks, and a proven ROI in as little as eight months, the solution has already been adopted as the field force mobilization platform of choice by a number of local housing authorities and building services organisations throughout the UK.

About Pervasic Ltd

Pervasic Ltd is the UK leader in advanced mobile data solutions for both the private and public sector. The company’s MobileOne platform-based solutions deliver the market’s most technically advanced products and service offerings, enabling organisations to dramatically improve productivity and control for mobile workers, and significantly enhance overall business efficiencies. Pervasic’s customer base includes major blue chip organisations, ranging from some of the world’s largest manufacturers to global transport ticketing specialists, vehicle telematics experts and specialist security services. The company operates primarily in the Break & Fix, Distribution and Logistics, Construction, and Housing Management markets, as well as working with numerous UK Local Authorities. Privately held, Pervasic is supported by established private equity institutions with majority investment from Frontiers Capital.

www.pervasic.com

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Monique Chambers
Devonshire Marketing
Tel: 0207 871 2781
Email: monique@devonshiremarketing.com