Reading, UK - AirVersent has announced that R.L.Dolby Ltd, a specialist supplier and maintainer of healthcare equipment for the Health Services throughout the UK, has gone live with its ServiceNet mobile workforce management solution. Dolby’s mobile engineering field force will receive jobs over Vodafone’s GPRS network directly to their hand held PDAs, enabling them to report progress and job completion. The new system is expected to deliver significant improvements in operational efficiency and customer service to the benefit of thousands of home-based patients throughout Scotland.

Headquartered in Stirling, Scotland, Dolby also installs and services oxygen therapy equipment for 3,400 patients on behalf of Scottish Healthcare Supplies affiliated with NHSScotland. Recent contract renewal imposed significantly tougher SLAs and prompted Dolby to investigate the replacement of manual paper based systems and improve field service engineer productivity.

Previously Dolby engineers were responsible for booking appointments with individual patients for equipment servicing, installs and removals. Now the new ServiceNet electronic mobile workforce solution from AirVersent takes task feeds from Dolby’s existing Strategix back office system. Using its built in dynamic job scheduling and appointment booking module ServiceNet produces a schedule of tasks based on task priority and target end date. Using the schedule call centre staff then proceed to make appointments with patients. The scheduler responds dynamically to appointments as they are booked to ensure optimised engineer routing and time slots. The system automatically sends an electronic proof of service document to NHSSctoland as each task is completed.

“The new system will have multiple benefits, which will have been achieved without any increase to headcount,” said Steven Laird, Admin & Quality Manager. “This will allow Dolby to bring all appointment booking in house from the field and provide our field engineers with a paperless system of working. This should have a positive effect on productivity and means that we have complete visibility of our operation at any time. Because the ServiceNet scheduler is dynamic, responding to appointments and real-time inputs from the field, we can provide a much better service, providing our clients with accurate and up to date information whenever it is required. This really comes in to play with urgent installs as we can now provide an immediate response, as to when we can respond to a request. Finally because of the seamless integration between ServiceNet and Strategix we can take the information from the PDA to progress the service call in the back office actually as it happens, taking care of the stock transactions, and updating the contract record and the patient details,” continued Laird.

“This is a great example of a mobile workforce solution that will benefit both back office and field working as well as demonstrably improve service delivery and customer satisfaction,” said Andrew Johnson, Sales Manager at AirVersent. “ServiceNet not only solves the paperwork problem by seamlessly handling transmission of data to and from the field but also delivers significant benefits thanks to its built in scheduler. This in turn provides Dolby with a significant improvement in activity management of its SLA’s and KPI measurement” continued Johnson.