Spring 2006

British Gas says it has completed the initial roll-out of the @Road (formerly Vidus) Tasforce field service management solution to 6,500 field engineers. To manage such a complex implementation effectively, it has been adding field engineers to the system in stages, at a rate of about 350 per week.

The project is not complete yet, however. British Gas now says it plans to add further field engineers to the system in its electrical and housing services division. This step will follow a pilot programme there.

British Gas says the attraction of the Taskforce product was its ability to automate the end-to-end service delivery management process, and the way it scales to a large number of field engineers and work orders. On average, British Gas engineers handle approximately eight million service requests annually.