Background
Alexander Dennis Limited (ADL) is the UK's leading bus and coach manufacturer, producing a wide range of innovative and fuel efficient, low floor single and double deck buses, plus a full portfolio of coaches, welfare and mini vehicles.
As well as manufacturing, ADL support their vehicles in the field with a fleet of over 30 UK experienced engineers located around the country ready to respond to customer issues. The After Market support offering is vital for companies who's revenue comes from ADL vehicles.
Challenge
With Vehicles being off the road often affecting customer revenues it is critical that ADL have a highly responsive team to respond to after market issues and concerns. ADL had an existing mobile field worker solution but the supplier was unable to provide the level of functionality and support required for such a critical system.
With engineers spread across the breadth of the country busy and continuously working or travelling to jobs, ADL needed a modern mobile solution that would make communication efficient and effective. Likewise they were looking to obtain more job timings and parts usage data for better MI reporting.
We needed to get back control of our system and have it support the business once more. FOS have supported us at every stage and we couldn't be more pleased.
P. O'Connor - IT Manager
Implementation
First Option Solutions (FOS) were chosen to provide a new mobile solution for ADL engineers and a web-based portal for the Call Centre. ADL chose the ACER S200 Smartphone that featured a high-resolution screen, 3G connectivity and built-in camera at a sensible cost.
FOS developed a C#.NET Windows Mobile application for the engineers to receive, view and update vehicle jobs assigned to them by the Call Centre.
With the engineers being able to easily track their time travelling to, and working on, individual jobs at the tap of a stylus,
ADL are able to access more MI information than ever before. New jobs and job updates created by the Call Centre are synchronized to PDA in a matter of seconds meaning an engineer can be dispatched in minutes. With After Sales care an important factor in proving sales value against market competition, the new statistics now available provide critical MI.