One of the biggest field workforce implementations to be announced in recent years is to be rolled out in British Gas's home service division. It will eventually involve 8,000 mobile workers, and is expected to cost up to £10 million over three years.

Details of the hardware and deployment have not been announced yet, but the main contractor on the project will be a.p.solve, the ex-BT spin-off company which has just renamed itself Vidus, and will be supplying its Taskforce mobile field force automation system.

The engineers handle a range of central heating, plumbing and electrical wiring work for nearly 4 million customers. The management task is complex, involving same-day scheduling of work which mostly comes in between 7am and 8am. Currently this job is handled on a semi-manual basis.

The attraction of the Taskforce solution is that it is expected to allow the organisation to manage changes in daily schedules in real time, reacting faster to customer emergencies and enhancing service levels. Equally significant, a.p.solve says it can achieve these improvements whilst actually reducing the cost base per task.

 

a.p.solve's solution was chosen after what is described as a long and highly competitive selection process. According to Peter Brickley, chief information officer for Centrica, British Gas's parent company: "Taskforce will synchronise the resources in our business from the call centre through to the field, and this end to end process management will truly redefine our customers' service experience."