Channel Safety Systems designs, manufactures, distributes, commissions and maintains equipment that requires compliance, where lives are at stake. Their service engineers carry out surveys, consultancy, installation and maintenance in the field and undertake commissioning and maintenance on behalf of major electrical wholesalers.
Job sheets completed by engineers are vital for keeping accurate records to satisfy BAFE accreditation and for invoicing, which are completed and faxed to the office – a process fraught with problems.
Often service coordinators don’t have information on hand to answer customers’ calls about progress, it sometimes takes weeks from job completion to invoicing and up to £100 was often spent on express deliveries to meet their 24 hour response commitment.
A solution was required to resolve these issues; it had to be simple to avoid major changes to working practices or the need for training. Destiny’s digital pen, which is based on Anoto technology, emerged as the most cost-effective answer.
Destiny consolidated the job sheets into one digitised booklet, which engineers now complete with a digital pen. Ticking a “send” box on the form automatically transmits the hand written details on the form from the pen via their mobile phones to Destiny’s secure servers.
The job number is the unique identifier that marries-up the information recorded in the field with pre-printed data on the individual job sheet. This data is drawn from the company’s in-house service management system and goes straight into the relevant customer’s job file as a graphical PDF, which contains all the information about a particular job.
“Using a unique job number and having the pdf sent back to our database so fast means that we can just click on the job sheet and instantly see all the details we need,” Diane Marjoram, Service Manager for Channel Safety Systems.
“Within thirty minutes of the completed job sheet coming in, our service team can now make a proactive call to the customer. If there’s equipment that needs attention, or needs to be added to, moved or replaced, we can act much faster and get the parts ordered. We’re fully up-to-date with what’s going on, and so are our customers. We’ve gone from poor visibility to being able to provide a brilliant service. Our paperwork is so well controlled now that we can concentrate on what really matters to our customers.”
Same day invoicing is also now a reality with the new system, a real boost for cash flow. There’s now a clear and full audit trail based on each job number. A five year lease and a monthly bill of just £15 per user covers the use of digital pens as well as form printing, licensing, hosting and support.
And the support, according to Diane Marjoram, is brilliant. “They’re friendly, and incredibly knowledgeable. Some other companies just make you want to scream. The Destiny team knows exactly what you’re talking about.”
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