April/May 2003

Southern Water, a company which already uses a mobile data system to relay work instructions to its 800 field engineers, is upgrading the existing system by issuing more versatile mobile phones to staff and enhancing the management software back at base.

The new handsets are Nokia Communicator 9210i models - the kind which has a flip-up fascia revealing a full QWERTY keyboard behind it. Southern Water was already using earlier 9110 Communicators, but the new version has more memory and other enhancements. For instance, each mobile now holds a 4,500-item asset register locally, allowing field engineers to identify equipment and record routine maintenance work on it.

The overall system was supplied by Telepartner Systems, which is now upgrading its Telepartner Mercury communications server to speed up transmissions to and from mobiles. This is done with Telepartner's TP2 technology.

Customer calls to the company's call centres are entered into its central MIMS works and asset management system. When a service call is involved, it is passed from here to the Telepartner communications server, which initiates an SMS call to the relevant engineer's handset (to handle this, Telepartner has a permanent link to Vodafone). The clever part is that the SMS message then prompts the handset to make an automatic GSM call to the Mercury server, which then passes back the full job details.

 

A further improvement in the new system has been the introduction of a new software set for the handhelds, featuring six different "cards" that are said to allow engineers to handle the most complex tasks they are likely to encounter. These can range in length from 30 minutes to a matter of days.

Other features of the new system are lone worker monitoring and an electronic software download (or ESD) system, which allows the latest version of the asset database to be downloaded to handsets remotely.