Dematek saved time and money with the office in the pocket.
INDUSTRY
Data-driven Professional Services
MORE INFO
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COMPANY
Dematek provides the world’s largest selection of lifting equipment. Head-quartered in Huddinge, Sweden, they have multiple offices and 160 employees.
The challenge.
Previously, loose notes, handwritten work orders and manual reporting was the norm for the large number of service technicans. They performed repairs, installations, and preventive maintenance of cranes and other lifting equipment at the sites of industrial customers across Sweden. Upon completion of the project, all work was documented and reported to the customer, which resulted in extensive administration.
According to the Service Manager the organisation did not have adequate IT systems in place to support their technicians and wanted to relieve them from paperwork to enable more efficient use of their time.
The administrative burden for each work order was heavy for the service administrators in the office as well. They received the technicians’ handwritten reports on materials, cost and time, and manually transferred these to the ERP and generated an invoice. This resulted not only in the same work being done twice but also the risk of errors as a result of illegible handwriting or misinterpretation of the information.
The solution.
In collaboration with Stratiteq, the service organisation began building a mobile app for field service work and at the same time integrated the solution with existing CRM and ERP.
”We involved a couple of their service technicians early on in the development process. They contributed their experience to make the app as user-friendly as possible and to ensure that relevant information was included in the transition to digital management of work orders and reporting”, says the Project Manager in charge at Stratiteq.
From the beginning all service technicians used the new system for paperless processing of work orders, materials, time reporting and invoice documentation. All information about customers, contracts and service objects was consolidated in a shared database, and all colleagues could easily access current work orders via their tablets. Instead of paper forms, digital checklists and protocols are used, which are filled in and signed directly by the customer. As a result, the customer received a report on the work performed before the service technician even left. At the same time, the data entered in the mobile app went directly into the ERP.
Service technicians who work in inaccessible locations without a network connection were able to use the app offline. Updates are made to a local database in the tablet and then synced with the central database as soon as the technician has access to the network again.
The impact.
With support for the entire workflow easily accessible on a computer or tablet, neither administrators nor service technicians needed to keep track of loose paper notes to do their jobs. The service technician does not have to rewrite thick stacks of paper each week, and the service administrator only needs to look through and possibly make a final edit to an auto-generated invoice before forwarding it to the customer.
”We completed the entire flow, from the point when a customer needs to have a job done until the invoice with correct specifications is sent and paid. This also provided a better overview of the service projects that are underway and smoother tracking of current customer agreements”, says the Service Manager at Dematek.
Stratiteq Business Developer Fredrik Swahn concludes: ”They have saved money and increased earnings using this system. Because everything is reported straight into the app, no hours, materials used or other extras are forgotten, and are now being invoiced in full. Tasks that were previously not really noted are now entered in the system and consequently invoiced. The administrators who organise the service technician’s workload can plan optimal routes between jobs, saving time and money.”
Once at the customer’s site, the app enables the technicians to order spare parts on the spot, which saves time and administration. They can also get contracts, service orders and other agreements signed by the customer in the app while on location, which not only provides an elevated level of customer service but also is great for sales. And last but not least, an important aspect for management is the visualisation of the service technician’s workload and performance.
