May/June 2004

Gilbarco, the fuel retailing and forecourt maintenance specialist, has chosen Sidewinder to supply a real-time service and mobile resource optimisation system for its 180-strong UK national service team.

The system will serve various functions. It will schedule most engineers' repair and maintenance visits automatically on the basis of customer calls made to the company's national service operation. Cleverly, it will also integrate new incoming calls with existing schedules dynamically, aiming all the time to optimise engineer productivity.

Behind the scenes, the software aims to recalculate routes and schedules all the time, automatically taking account of engineer availability, skill levels and road network details, as well as time needed to complete each call request.

According to Gilbarco's operations director, Brian Ellis: "The immediacy of response provided by the Sidewinder software will help us to achieve better utilisation of our engineers." He says the company expects to see a rapid increase in resource productivity, on-time service delivery and ability to service more customers. Later Sidewinder could also be used on the installation side of the business, he says.

 

Gilbarco has over 30,000 integrated point-of-sale systems and over a quarter of a million forecourt card payment devices in operation around the world. Its UK-based engineers handle around 750 jobs per day.