Situation
With intensive regulatory requirements on maintenance and compliance, fire protection is a business awash in paper reports. It also involves being constantly on the move, with mobile engineers making inspections and ensuring that fire systems are functioning across the country.
With 20 years of industry experience, FireVac Services know fire protection better than most. Dissatisfied with the limitations of their previous IT platform, Andrew Hickman, FireVac's Operations Manager, went looking for a better approach. He wanted a web-based solution that would integrate head-office business operations with a highly mobile workforce, providing an efficiency boost across the enterprise. "We examined some off the shelf options," says Andrew. "But none were able to support our needs."
Instead, FireVac asked Brennan to help them create a new system from scratch using Web 2.0 and Windows Mobile technology. Andrew says: "Beside their technical acumen, one reason we chose Brennan was that, as a mid-size company of similar scale to ourselves, we could count on our business being important to them."
Solution
In close consultation with FireVac, Brennan created FireMate, a web-based platform using the latest mobile network services to communicate with staff in the field.
The system is now the backbone of FireVac's operation. Via a web-browser, the company's service co-ordinators are able to issue tasks to the mobile workforce, who in turn lodge reports on site visits, log jobs for attention, and send images via their PDAs.
Back at base, a business wide dashboard provides customised views of real time activity, giving an at-a-glance picture of work pending and tasks being carried out.
The system also provides workflows to manage regular and ad hoc activities such as defect tracking, quoting, job execution and invoicing. Through integration with FireVac's accounting package, the system automates FireVac's billing processes from the moment a technician wirelessly logs that they've started work on a site, to final review and issuing.
In an industry with a strict regulatory framework, the system also delivers monthly reports to FireVac's customers on work carried out or pending, while also automating annual reports to be lodged with the regulator according to the industry's ITM&S (Inspection, Test, Maintenance and Survey) standard.
Coded using .NET and with an SQL back-end, the system takes advantage of AJAX to serve dynamically updated pages, speeding end-user operation. End users can customise their view of system functions to suit their role, while the platform is secured through role based security to functions and data, and SSL encryption.
As well as using their PDAs to guide them to the next job, the mobile workforce can also transmit images of faulty equipment to be attached to work orders or invoices. And if the mobile signal is interrupted – as can happen in tall buildings – the PDA automatically stores job information for transmission as connectivity is restored.
The central server is fully managed and hosted at Brennan's data centre – providing the highest levels of redundancy and reliability – and a Private IP link provides secure connectivity to FireVac's offices.
Benefits
Andrew says that the new system has had an immediate impact on FireVac's operations.
Automated workflows are streamlining the company's operations, especially when it comes to integration with FireVac's accounting software, where the system is driving an improved cash flow. "Before the new system, it took a day and half of data entry every week to manually create invoices," says Andrew. "These are now automatic."
Customer service has also been greatly enhanced. FireVac's service co-ordinators now ensure that mobile technicians are best deployed to serve the customer base, while automated reporting keeps customers abreast of developments in their fire protection management.
Best of all, because the industry's ITM&S standard is built in to the application, FireVac has discovered a new found speed and efficiency in executing regulatory tasks.
Asked about FireVac's relationship with Brennan, Andrew says, "Throughout the development process, they've been very good. Everything they've promised has been delivered on time, and they've also worked around our requirements and timetable."
Throughout its development, test builds of the system were made available to FireVac to ensure the project was advancing as desired. Constant checking of the application against expectations ensured that costs remained low. Brennan have also provided in-house training on the new system, as well as offering advice to ease the system's adoption.
Post deployment, Brennan and FireVac have now entered into a five year maintenance and support phase to ensure not only that the application scales in line with FireVac's growth, but that it also adapts to industry changes while taking advantage of new technological developments to further productivity gains.
Supporting the new system is Brennan's 24/7 helpdesk. In addition, proactive monitoring by the Brennan team also helps to ensure the application's continual availability, pre-empting operational issues before service levels are affected.
