Faced with a strongly growing order book, a nationwide servicing contractor found they could no longer manage their work with homemade spreadsheets and databases and needed a control system. Not only was human error creeping in, but in some cases customers were being billed incorrectly.
The contractor commissioned Perceptis to develop a brand new Job Allocation & Control web application.
The Job Allocation & Control System allows all of the contractor's customers, operating locations and staff to be tracked, as well as the contracts and invoicing details for those contracts.
As the contractor undertakes servicing work, many of the jobs recur at regular frequencies but one-off repair work also needed to be catered for. The Job Allocation & Control System allows each job to be entered, along with full details of the necessary work and the recurrent frequency. One-off jobs can be added at any time.
From this information the system is able to build a schedule of work and the contractor's staff are able to see this as far into the future as they need to. From the schedule of work, the customer can be contacted to agree the exact date of the visit and the job can be assigned to a suitably qualified field service engineer.
The field service engineers are able to pull the work allocated to them down to a PDA and alternatively the system can also produce PDF job sheets for printing or e-mailing. Whether on paper or PDA, full descriptions of each task the engineer needs to do is given, making it very quick for new members of the field service team to get up to speed.
Once the work is completed the field service engineer is able notify the system that the job is done and supply comments and other associated information that needs to be retained. The job will then be marked for invoicing.
Where regular service work is carried out, customers can be invoiced at various regular frequencies such as monthly or quarterly, with additional invoices being raised for repair or ad-hoc work.
The Job Allocation & Control System provides a list of outstanding invoices and produces PDF versions of invoices which can then be e-mailed to customers.
