April/May 2002

If any company was going to serve as an ideal candidate for a mobile data application, it had to be Siemens Communications. Forget the fact that it deals in telecoms systems itself; its whole support infrastructure was a case study in the making.

A bit of background, though. Essentially, Siemens Communications provides telecommunications systems and services, working with a wide variety of UK customers. And that inevitably involves an extensive, widely-dispersed field support organisation.

The company's customer services division (CSD) has a classic hub-and-spoke structure, with information sources and technical expertise at the centre and field engineers at the periphery. A call centre known as the Customer Interaction Centre (CIC) coordinates and controls the company's 550 field engineers, and this receives calls from customers and acts as the link between job assignment and completion.

Communications with the field engineers are driven by the CIC, and in the past relied heavily on voice calls and manual data inputs. Call centre staff input customer and technical data into the SAP database and allocate jobs to engineers. In 56 per cent of service requests the issue can be resolved remotely, but if the fault is not fixed within 30 minutes the call is passed to a field service engineer.

 

Siemens believed that mobile technology could significantly enhance the service to customers ­ and do so more cost efficiently than existing business processes.

"However, with a projected investment of £1.1 million, the onus was on us to make a strong business case to proceed," explains project manager Ian Cameron. A review of the customer service business was followed by a short pilot project to evaluate possible solutions.

The business case targets included break-even to be achieved within 15 months, and a return on investment of 25 to 30 per cent. The team predicted a significant productivity gain in the CIC and field service environments, which could be used to improve both service to customers and the division's profitability.

Additionally, a 5 per cent saving in logistics costs was anticipated, mainly through a reduction in erroneous parts ordering.

An analysis of tasks performed by the call centre employees and engineers identified a variety of issues to resolve ­ unnecessary duplication of effort; information flows between customers and engineers that were altogether too complicated; and a potential for misinterpretation of data.

To evaluate potential solutions, Siemens set up a pilot project in its Scottish region. "Our national service centre is based in Wellingborough," says Ian Cameron, "and Scotland provided a good test of network coverage, with its mix of customers in urban locations and isolated rural spots." Engineers were split into teams tied into region, postcode and site details, with each potential solution rotating between them. Having exact site details available was important to establish the quality of the network coverage, as engineers are often working deep inside buildings.

Feedback from engineers was obtained from questionnaires, and from logging both voice calls and data traffic and a weekly feedback report. The number of events each field engineer covered each day was also recorded.

The pilot helped identify three key critical criteria: the wireless network, the mobile device and integration to the application.

The wireless network had to provide coverage even in rural areas, so engineers could access the database wherever customer installations were located. GPRS emerged as the best solution both from a coverage viewpoint and from its ability to handle large amounts of data in real time.

In the past, engineers had, within reason, been able to specify their own equipment, including separate phones, laptop computers and personal organisers. Cameron was keen to standardise mobile devices to ensure that there was a clear upgrade path that could exploit new technology and applications as they became available ­ and to ensure that all the engineers could access Siemens' existing SAP-based business systems.

That meant the device had to have integrated communications and data entry capability. It also had to be practical and resilient and attractive. "Attractiveness might sound frivolous," Cameron says, "but if engineers value something, they're more likely to take care of it."

A Siemens SX45 PDA with integral mobile phone has provided the solution. It can be used for GSM voice calls as well as GPRS data connections to the corporate network. The SX45s have a mobile business application that gives engineers access to the office-based service control systems.

The pilot scheme proved a resounding success, resulting in a 10 per cent rise in engineers' productivity and a massive 82 per cent reduction in voice calls between the CIC and engineers. The system has now gone live in Scotland and is being rolled out to the various Siemens regions over the next few months.

The pilot also revealed that for true effectiveness, it was not possible to isolate field service activities from other areas of the company. Engineers needed access to the full range of company resources and applications. So in future, it expects to add applications such as automatic scheduling of engineers' diaries, and "e-document" facilities such as customer-chargeable work forms, on-screen signatures and bar-coding capability for site audits.

Finally, Cameron says it is vital for companies to acknowledge that the users ­ in this case the engineers ­ buy into the technology. "There's no point forcing a solution on the mobile workforce, they have to want to use it."