Pitney Bowes boosts efficiency with mobile worker app

Pitney Bowes has boosted the productivity of its field force engineers with a mobility app to enable on-the-fly access to core Siebel and SAP systems.

The company, which supplies mailroom equipment such as franking machines to offices, has deployed the mobile application to 1,000 field engineers in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK.

The AMPower Service app from Antenna allows Pitney Bowes engineers to have real-time visibility of corporate systems via their PDA and to make updates from the field, rather than relaying the info to a call centre operative - the previous method of transferring such data.

Dave Strain, IT business solutions director for Pitney Bowes Europe, explained: "[It] puts a screen on a PDA - a Windows Mobile device - and allows them [engineers] to receive information and record information and send it back into the centre. So the application really allows the engineer to communicate with our central systems as opposed to communicating with people that can communicate with our central systems."

Since deploying the mobility app, Pitney Bowes said more than 90 per cent of all service calls are automatically directed to the correct engineer without any manual intervention or delay.

The system also means customers can be kept up to date on the progress of their service request - and customers can be billed more efficiently because invoices can be processed as soon as the engineer's mobile device updates the system.

Engineers also use the system to log any damage to machines and check on contractual obligations via their PDA, meaning there are fewer discrepancies and credit notes need to be raised less frequently.

Strain told silicon.com: "We've got real-time visibility of work loads, which engineers are doing what, when. We have greater visibility of the number of calls we've got verses the number of engineers we've got in any area at any time simply because it's all computerised. It's all electronic, you just press the button and you get the data - whereas previously you'd have to go and talk to the dispatchers.

Engineers out on jobs use their PDAs to record which replacement parts are being used so Pitney Bowes can maintain real-time inventory of stock in the field - previously parts had to be expensed out of the warehouse. Parts used during a repair are logged by the system and replacements ordered automatically.

Another business benefit of deploying the app is reduced staff costs as Pitney Bowes has been able to reduce headcount in its call centres - though Strain refused to be drawn on the number of jobs that have gone as a result.

Achieving mobile field force bliss was not all plain sailing, however. Strain said that giving engineers a sense of choice about which mobile device they would be wearing on their belt proved crucial.

He said: "Having the field operatives feel that they'd chosen the device was a big success factor. In the UK we didn't leave them with that feeling and that was a problem for us and they weren't keen on the device."

Fortunately Pitney Bowes had negotiated a clause in its supplier contract that enabled it to swap out all the devices in the first three years. So after about a year it switched from XDAs to iPacs - which made the UK engineers happy.