Job Allocation & Control System (JACS)
Case Study

Background

Aegis Water Treatment is a privately owned, independent air and water environmental services contractor based in Tamworth, Staffordshire. They offer an outsourced solution for the monitoring and maintenance of air and water systems, in particular to ensure their customers are fully compliant with legislation on prevention of Legionnaires' disease.

Aegis has grown steadily since it was founded in 1998 and includes many leading organisations in their customer base across diverse application sectors including education, leisure, power generation, manufacturing & engineering and building & facilities management.

Aegis is also one of the few companies of its type to operate an in-house engineering facility that trains and develops its own team of highly-qualified electrical and mechanical engineers.

The Challenge

Managing a large multi-disciplinary team of engineers based nationwide and matching available skills and resources to customer demand is extremely challenging. Not only does Aegis need to schedule and monitor preventative maintenance work to defined time scales, they also need to allow for ad hoc breakdown and unplanned service tasks.

Historically this management task was carried out manually by a team of dedicated administrators using spreadsheets and a diary function. However as the company grew this approach became less reliable and prevented Aegis from managing its staff and resources as efficiently and effectively as it would like.

Paul Sowden, Aegis’ MD commented “I was absolutely certain that we could be more efficient – to our customers’ benefit as well as our own. I wanted to automate the repetitive tasks and also the forward planning of our engineering workload, allowing our internal administrators the capacity to work on customer service tasks that add real value.”

Having already worked with us to create the LeMa system, Paul came along with a broad brief which was to create a web-based job control system that holds details of customers and prospects, contracts, sites under management and the work required at each site.

This system needed to inform Aegis of all outstanding work due within a defined period and produce detailed Engineers’ job sheets.

We suggested that by inputting prospects as well as customers, the system would allow the data to be extracted for marketing purposes. The system also needed to have a similar look and feel to LeMa to assist with internal staff training and acceptance, and it also needed to be structured to form a solid foundation on which future enhancements could be added as and when Aegis required.

Development Process

JACS was developed in iterative phases over a three month period, going live in October 2009. Perceptis worked closely with Aegis and regular meetings were held to review each phase and set priorities for the next phase.

This close collaboration and building of the system in iterations meant that Aegis were able to be sure the system was progressing well and this quickly gained their full confidence. The regular meetings also were used to 'iron out' any minor changes needed to the system where the specification may have been slightly misinterpreted or new challenges had emerged.

Customers, Sites & Assets

Many of Aegis Water's customers are large multi-site organisations and JACS allows them to record all customers, site details and water assets to be serviced at those sites. The database behind the JACS system currently handles well over 100 different client accounts with hundreds of individual sites between them - and it has the capacity for many times this level of data as the Company grows.

Given that there can be many hundreds of assets on a large distributed site such as a hospital - this comprehensive overview of the “universe” of all the assets at every client site for which they are responsible - is of critical importance to Aegis Water. Now however, instead of having to manage this manually by client, they have an instant overview of all their contractual responsibilities.

Dynamic Scheduling

Many water assets need regular servicing to a set schedule. The JACS system identifies this and automatically generates the required service visit dates along with the associated work schedule for the engineer. This allows Aegis to see all the work that is due in a given forward period enabling them to plan their engineering capacity, resources and training accordingly.

Based on this dynamic scheduling functionality, JACS then prompts Aegis to allocate an engineer to each job. Using a colour coding system JACS shows Aegis the status of all the work to be done including alerting them to unallocated jobs and potential over due situations using the exception reporting approach.

The system then produces the engineers’ job sheets as well as providing which can be accessed by e-mail or PDA. It also creates a graphical twelve month forward plan of scheduled work to be done for each site, as well as other regulatory paperwork for end user client compliance.

In addition to regular scheduled service and maintenance work, ad hoc engineering works and service call outs (non scheduled) are an important part of the service Aegis provides to its clients. The system allows this work to be entered into JACS and then managed accordingly, again enabling Aegis to have full control of their total workload and capacity planning.

Automatic Invoicing Reminders

The JACS database and management system is designed to speed up invoicing and improve its accuracy. Once an engineer completes a task, JACS marks it for invoicing thus removing errors and duplication and helping with active cash flow management.

In every case data input is speeded up and made consistent by the effective use of drop down menus and there are multiple and customised views of the work schedule – both historical and future. This enables Aegis to meet and usually exceed its clients’ demands for timely, accurate and useful management information.

Deployment & Future Development

The system is now fully deployed. Thanks to thorough testing it has performed flawlessly and already several enhancements are being explored to add even more functionality as part of a process of continual development and improvement.