Enton Consulting & Technology has announced the launch of Enton Service Manager - a new software solution to help streamline facilities maintenance organisations, reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve customer service.
Enton Service Manager is an integrated back office and engineer management system that is particularly relevant to organisations with field service engineers and mobile workers, especially within property maintenance, mechanical, electrical and environmental services.
"According to research consultancy Cebre, 7.25 million workers, or 27% of the UK working population spend more than a third of their time working outside their employers' buildings. Of these, around 5 million are blue collar workers in building services, IT maintenance, transport, the trades and similar industries.
"Despite the rapid development of mobile communications, hand-held terminals and software targeted at helping deployment and management of mobile workforces, many of the systems in place have failed to deliver significant performance improvements," says Tim Harris, Managing Director of Enton Consulting & Technology.
Harris comments that this could be due to a number of circumstances: poorly engineered terminals; ineffective integration with central IT systems and business processes; poor treatment of guaranteed message delivery or communication black spots - all of which undermine realisation of business benefits.
"Many organisation still operate using mobile voice and some combination of data downloads of work schedules, equipment and parts details and so on to an engineer's portable computer. This results in fragmented processes, inefficiency and inability to respond to clients' short term needs.
"Ultimately, it may also result in poor customer experience through late or missed appointments, turning up with the wrong parts, or overruns because of inaccurate job descriptions.
"Now, following a period of intensive development, we have a proven solution in Enton Service Manager. This is a genuinely different product that includes mobile workers in the corporate information hub and brings together all of the management and business process functions that are essential to helping operations and facilities managers take real control of mobile operations," Harris adds.
Importantly, Enton Consulting & Technology has overcome the problems associated with loss of network connection, whether due to environmental and location circumstances - underground in tunnels, in buildings where signals cannot penetrate, or just poor network coverage.
The system has been designed and tested to support thousands of users, as is the case at Carillion Facilities Services, part of the £9 billion turnover Carillion infrastructure, building and business services group. But it is equally suited to organisations with only small in-house maintenance teams.
Enton Service Manager is made up of four modules:
- Operation Manager, which runs the core of the business, automating routine work, supporting customer service and performing straight through processing (STP). It operates with essential corporate systems including HR and payroll, document management, finance and accounting, management information and email.
- Engineer's Terminal, which provides access to key information and processes through a personal digital assistant (PDA) or other mobile device. Functionality to help increase productivity and reduce administrative workload includes diary and job scheduling, job recording, purchasing, time sheets, electronic job completion, sign-off and reporting and expenses claims.
- Client Portal, which allows customers to enter work directly into Service Manager and view the status of jobs, delivering strengthened customer service and also reducing administrative workload.
- Mobile Manager, which is the gateway between an engineer's mobile terminal, Operation Manager and back office systems. It provides guaranteed message delivery and manages allocation of mobile devices in the field.
The company also provides services to manage the broader change programme, such as benefits measurement, training, stakeholder reporting and expectations management.
