Site design problem resolution
Plan
“Early discussions with the IT department were essential for the timely development of the infrastructure for a mobile solution, although TW were not perfect concerning this we have learnt a great deal with respect to the development of such projects in the future.”
Rob Ramsay, IT, Taylor Woodrow
“The mobile application will enable real time dispatch / completion of jobs and accurate reporting to our clients.”
Paul Raynor, Project Champion, Taylor Woodrow
“The provision early within the project of an agreed functional specification helps significantly in reducing problems later in the project delivery.”
David Dean, Project manager, TBS
Background
The help desk is the first and arguably the most important interface with customers. It is here that work is logged, resources allocated and site visits scheduled. Facilities Management call centres receive on average 1,316 requests each month. The efficiency with which these calls are managed through to completion of the work goes a long way towards influencing the clients' overall perception of the quality of service.
What used to happen prior to a mobile application being applied was that mobile maintenance staff updated their schedules of site visits or jobs when they received e-mails at home on their laptop computers, or were phoned when an urgent job was received by the call centre.
A method of mobile data communication was investigated which would provide real time data management and reduce the need for data collection or updates to be carried out outside normal working hours.
Problem
There are large overhead costs and delays in reporting and invoicing due to paperwork overload, and mobile staff not having a direct link into the Taylor Woodrow Maximo database, other than via a Laptop PC. As these are not generally carried around while the technicians are carrying out their duties, this leads to delays in updating the central Maximo database. New jobs are sometimes not picked up until hours after dispatch and reports have to be typed up after the maintenance event and loaded onto the database before any responses can be given to clients. Delays in providing documentation, delays in reporting and significant evening work for Mobile Technicians in emailing reports, documentation and updating the Maximo Database were areas which required significant improvement.
Solution
The chosen solution is a link from the Taylor Woodrow Maximo database that alerts by two distinct methods. First via SMS to a mobile phone that a job has been dispatched which provides limited data, that includes the site details and the problem description with contact details. The second method is the actual dispatch of the job details and the problem description from the Maximo database through to Taskmaster, which then provides the communications medium to dispatch the job data over GPRS to the PDA so the mobile technician can carry out the job.
Assuming the mobile technician accepts the job then information is sent back immediately to Maximo which indicates the job acceptance and the time / date (all acceptances and estimated times are recorded - time and date stamped), and the job status either as 'in progress' or 'on hold'. Estimated time of arrival can be recorded as this can be keyed in by the maintenance technician. Once the technician arrives on site then he / she can indicate this as 'on site' and when the job has been completed they can also indicate the completion of the job (time generated automatically for all activities). Job detail information has been set up as 'pick lists' to obviate the need to type long text descriptions and to speed up the process of data entry. All details are sent back to Maximo and are recorded either as log notes and also as specific field entries in Maximo which allow subsequent reports to be generated. This will enable greater data efficiency and reduces staff requirements to update Maximo from home.
Pilot
“The development of a mobile application has enabled Taylor Woodrow to extend it's fixed IT infrastructure to incorporate wireless links.”
Rob Ramsay, IT, Taylor Woodrow
“The use of mobile technology has not been lost to other parts of our business, other ideas and processes are being considered.”
Paul Raynor, Project Champion, Taylor Woodrow
“I like the PDA but want to do more with it.”
Ian Burton, Team Leader, Taylor Woodrow
Pilot information
The Orange M1000 PDA and subsequently the M2000 PDA were chosen by the maintenance staff against a number of different PDA devices. This was in part a committee of 8 maintenance technicians from various projects looking at the various features each device offered and the robustness of such a device given that they had to be used in a 'work' environment. Taylor Woodrow IT department also had a say in the devices that were to be offered however the final choice was down to the maintenance technicians themselves.
The choice of Taskmaster was decided from a tender process which evaluated the various providers of such software applications against a performance specification. Taskmaster is off the shelf software which needed customisation to suit the intended use. TBS (who produce Taskmaster) have experience in the European construction industry that helped them to be chosen by Taylor Woodrow for this project.
Training was developed in house and with TBS around the Taskmaster software and the PDA use, this was presented to all those on the pilot study and generally took no more than 3-4 hours. The PDA was rolled out to four mobile maintenance staff initially to test the communications environment and also to prove that data could indeed be sent and received in real time. Within a month this was increased to 12 and subsequently 22 users. Although in this time there were evident software 'bugs' these were found by the regular updates requested by the 'pilot' maintenance project staff, and the updates and fixes were applied as needed. There was also the need to prove how easy or hard the use of such software would be in the work environment. Over the period of approximately two months issues around the operation of PDA devices and the Taskmaster software reduced from ten per week down to zero.
Development notes
The main change that the technicians found was the adoption of the PDA and not the actual software. Some staff were not very computer literate and looked upon the PDA as a hindrance to them completing the tasks required of them. However, it soon became apparent that the lack of IT knowledge was not a significant issue and those people with the most IT knowledge caused additional issues because they were more inclined to explore into other applications which were not supported of needed.
Internal changes
Staff concern has been insignificant as the solution has made significant changes to make their working day easier. IT processes have been or are being developed to provide a common and consistent reporting format (actuate reports or Maximo dashboard provision). Mobile phones have not been replaced as this provides a more convenient medium to carry out verbal conversations, and they are also used to deliver the SMS messaging capability separately from the PDA to ensure delivery.
Costs
Much of the costs at this stage are for the infrastructure development and the development of the Taskmaster application to suit the Taylor Woodrow FM needs including the xml interface with Maximo.
Deployment
“The application of mobile technology helps to get that initial win when bidding for new projects; it is increasingly seen that the provision of real time data is needed so that clients can manage their business effectively.”
Paul Raynor, Project Champion, Taylor Woodrow
“The PDA saves me time and effort contacting the helpdesk.”
Ian Burton, Team Leader, Taylor Woodrow
“I like the PDA but want to do more with it.”
David Dean, Project manager, TBS
Implementation
TW Facilities Management are currently out of a pilot and firmly into implementation to those parts of the business that will provide value to our clients and to the improvement to data capture. The number of users currently stands at 30, this is primarily because we have additional infrastructure changes that will include device lock down, anti virus and management tools to allow remote management of the device in the field. TW IT department have developed further the capability to save and manipulate the software to be retained within the fixed ROM of the PDA, which means if the device lost its power, once re-supplied the Windows operating system would reboot as well as the Tasksmaster application. All that would be needed there after would be the setting of the time and date information in the PDA, and the personnel details of the user and a call to the TW IT department to reset the password to enable access to the TW IT infrastructure.
Site issues
There are a few issues to be resolved as you would expect on any new IT project, having a contact for any issues that is friendly and clear for the users is vital to actually getting a concise feedback.
Maintenance technicians are generally happy with the use of PDA's for logging jobs. They are still not fully confident with a few of the software limits but do think it's an improvement on what they used to do. Both the paper system of capturing data and the Taskmaster method have been used in parallel, which the business requires until full confidence in the Taskmaster application had been achieved. This has placed an extra burden on the maintenance technicians in duplicating effort and they are driving to remove this, as they see the need of capturing the data twice unnecessary.
Solution
The solution has been developed with a view of further stage improvements in the future where additional features can be included as the time and resources to develop these demand them (small changes are already included as the use of Taskmaster develops).
A lot of time and effort is being placed in the additional reporting that has been made available due to the capture of data in to Maximo which is always 100%.
So far 30 pilot Mobile Technicians has cost roughly £360K: 7% PDAs and van installations of PDA software, 30% modifications to Maximo, 25% IT infrastructure, 15% additional communications, 20% TW management and 3% other expenses. Taylor Woodrow is expecting the investment to recover its cost in 3 Years.
Evaluation
“This clearly has been an interesting project where the development around Windows CE and the knowledge of manipulation of mobile device ROM have helped to developed this project.”
Sean McAndrew, IT Analyst, Taylor Woodrow
“Information capture is now real time and 100% accurate instead of the ad hoc data capture we as a company had previously.”
Paul Raynor, Project Champion, Taylor Woodrow
“Mobile Repair Technicians require very reliable and secure systems with fast access to data while on the move, making it easy for them to provide the best possible services to customers.”
Phil Russell, Customer Director, TBS
Evaluation ROI
Purely from the time savings TW have calculated that the solution ROI is within 3 years, this will be reduced with the other improvements which are harder to quantify. It is unlikely that any client would have noticed the difference in the information provided however, the risk of providing inaccurate data to a client has now been significantly reduced. More accurate cost data is certainly been captured which in the future will help the client with their budgeting for FM works. The reporting of Service Level Agreement's based on real time data should ensure that these SLA's now are not missed (always an issue previously) In short the client is benefiting from the investment that TW have made to improved data capture.
Costs
The cost of the PDAs as a unit are currently £250 each which TW purchase and thus allows TW to 'play' with the settings as we see fit. The ongoing costs are the data usage; currently £7.90 per 8M of data, and the licence cost for the Taskmaster software, currently £117.50 per licence. On going maintenance costs to TBS to provide support run to £12k per year assuming there are 100 users (this will increase as more users are using the Taskmaster application). Mobile charging equipment in vans also needed are approximately £60 per unit depending on the vehicle.
Lessons
MRT Mobile project (Mobile Repair Technician) has certainly taken a lot longer than was originally anticipated. This was primarily due to the aspirations of the business to have an application up and running quickly, and the IT infrastructure not being able to cope with the changes quickly enough and the maintenance of security integrity. Future projects will undoubtedly have an easier time in applying new applications in the wireless field as the infrastructure and security aspects are already there having been developed on the back of this project.
What next?
MRT Mobile Phase 2 will include the provision of stock control (van stock) and the method of accounting for the same with reordering automatically. This may involve some other smart technology such as RFID tags etc. Other parts of the business have already taken advantage of the deliverables that this project has produced and these may in the future be found in the better management of the building process in the Developments division. Other applications will be the use of Taskmaster in fixed site locations, where this is desirable, and possibly the use of data capture technologies either based around infrared, bluetooth or zigbee