Articles
Sybase Article on Service Automation
Mobility is a key factor in Service Automation’s recent success. Providing handheld Pocket PCs to their customers’ mobile workforce has added dispatch, multi-warehouse inventory, and field force automation capabilities to their product line.
Key Benefits
Field technicians can focus on their skilled task, rather than filling out paperwork
By saving time on paperwork, technician can complete more service calls in a day, resulting in increased revenue
Invoices are submitted in the field and better reflect both the actual time spent by the technician and the parts installed at the jobsite. The home office needs only to verify completed work instead of transcribing handwritten job invoices
Increased inventory accuracy as parts are tracked from the moment they enter the warehouse until they are installed at a customer site
Dispatcher can fill technician job queues based on the handheld’s current job status
Customer Profile
Service Automation sells integrated accounting, payroll and inventory systems. The company’s customer base includes organizations with technicians and trucks in the field performing services. Service Automation is a textbook example of a company positioning itself to progressively expand into complementary areas as new technology becomes available.
Business Challenge
With a suite of back office application packages for mobile service and repair shops, Service Automation needed to extend their product offering out to mobile technicians.
Solution
Sybase PocketBuilder, combined with Sybase SQL Anywhere Studio and its UltraLite™ database for handhelds, gave Service Automation the necessary tools to extend automation to their customers’ mobile workforce. SQL Anywhere’s Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) database powers the home office systems that aggregate the handheld information and use it in accounting, payroll and inventory applications. Synchronization between the handhelds and the home server is managed by MobiLink.
Results
On average, by using a mobile solution to dispatch service technicians into the field, the gains in efficiency save enough time for each technician to handle an extra call each day. The home office no longer needs to compile invoices from the field; this eliminates transcription errors and removes a significant data entry cost. Inventory location and usage is more accurate because each truck in the field acts as a mobile warehouse and parts are added to invoices by simply scanning a barcode in the truck.
Why Sybase?
Sybase’s mobile technology matched the business and technical requirements. Service Automation has used Sybase PowerBuilder since 1994. Sybase solutions have worked so well and become such an integral part of their own products that Service Automation has become an authorized Sybase VAR.
Industry
Field Service, Handheld/Wireless Computing, Field Force/Office Automation, Field Service
Taking it to the Streets
The average day of a journeyman plumber or service technician has a surprising amount of time spent doing tasks not involved with actually performing the skilled job or driving to the worksite. By necessity, these professions have a seemingly inescapable burden of paperwork, the bulk of which is created by the skilled tradesman at the customer site. This includes writing cost estimates, tracking time, noting any parts used on the job, writing invoices for the work and parts, and gathering information on the next site to visit. Cumulative inefficiencies add up and a shop with a fleet of trucks sees each truck and worker in the field acting as a multiplier because the skilled tradesmen are spending a significant percentage of their time engaged in the necessary evil of paperwork.
Service Automation recently extended their integrated service management product, SAWIN Professional, so it addresses and eliminates not only the inefficiencies engendered by service technicians in the field, but also the staff at the home office who sort through field paperwork dumped on them at the end of the day. The new mobility layer of their flagship product, SAWIN Professional, uses handheld Pocket PC computers in the field connecting to the home base accounting, inventory, and dispatch systems.
The company’s customer base includes HVAC, plumbing, garage door, refrigeration, and mechanical contractors – companies with technicians and trucks in the field performing services. Customers range from service shops with five or six technicians to large outfits using 200 technicians in the field.
SAWIN Professional’s architecture relies on Sybase PowerBuilder and ASA-based back office applications communicating with field technicians using handheld devices running a Sybase PocketBuilder application that utilizes the UltraLite database. Connectivity and database synchronization issues are managed by SQL Anywhere’sMobiLink technology.
The net result of this assembled technology is a highly efficient mobile workforce connected to back office systems populated with current information on all jobs being worked by the mobile tradesmen.
Injecting Mobility into an Existing Solution
Service Automation is based in Houston, TX. In 1994 Service Automation began developing SAWIN Professional, a PowerBuilder-based integrated system that included inventory, job costing, general ledger, accounts receivable, payroll, counter sales, order entry, and marketing functionality. SAWIN Professional is a comprehensive solution for installation, service, and repair shops; its features address the specific needs of service shops and the product has been installed in more than 200 locations.
Owner, Charles Haycraft foresaw mobile technology coming into its own. Haycraft had been involved in the computer industry since 1969 and was part of the bar-code/handheld revolution that swept the supermarket industry in the 1970’s. When he outlined the architecture of the SAWIN modules, he made sure a future mobile solution could overlay the base system.
Service Automation’s customers had highly streamlined back office systems, but each day their disconnected fleet of trucks produced a sizable load of paperwork that needed to be entered into the back office systems. The field technician’s productivity was also hampered by the task of generating the paperwork. A mobile solution that automated both sides of the equation –home office integration and tracking field work – would be a boon to their customers. Another feature included with handheld technology is the ability to scan barcodes. Inventory can be alarmingly fluid in a small shop with a mobile staff. Parts move from the shop to the truck and onto the customer site. The detail involved in tracking the inventory migration further decreased the field technician’s productivity.
When Sybase announced PocketBuilder in 2003, Service Automation was one of the early adopters. PocketBuilder gave them the ability to use their PowerBuilder coding skills to move existing code to handhelds and develop a new class of add-on modules that integrated with the existing system and targeted the inherent inefficiencies resulting from fielding a mobile workforce. PocketBuilder additionally provided an opportunity to enhance Service Automation’s product offering by adding new features for dispatching and inventory that had direct applicability to their customers.
The company had built a solid suite of integrated back office applications and Sybase PocketBuilder gave them the tools to complete their product offering, closing the loop between field people and the home office, and extending the inventory and dispatching capabilities of the product.
Efficiency Gains in the Field
Service Automation implemented a Pocket PC product extension named SAWIN PALM. SAWIN PALM and its supporting software, the SAWIN Field Automation System, extends their customers’ reach from the home office to a fleet of trucks spread across a local geographic area. As with their existing product modules, the Field Automation System is an integrated solution that ties into the back office software. The mobile product layer includes dispatch, work order download, part and service pricing, credit card processing, and customer signature capture. Each truck has a printer for invoices. A technician’s time is tracked on the handheld; the technician starts the clock when they begin the job and they can stop it for breaks. The actual billable time is then included in the invoice.
To test the early version of the mobile offering and make sure the software addressed issues that directly impacted a field technician’s efficiency, Haycraft spent two days riding in his customer’s service trucks and shadowing repair technicians. He found the technicians liked the handheld system because it saved them effort, especially when performing the mundane tasks. For example, a high percentage of the service calls had the same work description with information like, ‘The unit was inspected, the problem was located, the faulty part was replaced and the unit was verified to be in working order.’ With a single selection on the handheld, the technicians could add this description they previously wrote several times a day by hand to the invoice. The description could be dropped in as-is, or changed slightly to fit specific circumstances. This feature alone won immediate points from the technicians.
Efficiency Gains at the Dispatch Desk
Haycraft also discovered he had a winner with the dispatch scheduling operation. Mobile connectivity gives the home office dispatcher a look-ahead capability for scheduling the technician’s time. According to Haycraft, “As the technician was finishing a call, the next call was already downloaded to the handheld and ready to go; he didn’t have to communicate with anyone. This technician was doing residential servicing, and so back at the office – because the service technician was synchronized – the dispatcher could see when they had arrived at the job. The dispatcher then called the next customer to tell them the technician would be there in about an hour. As is often the case in residential work, the customer might not be home so the dispatcher could simply move to the next available customer. This process seamlessly keeps the technician’s job queue filled without interrupting the technician with scheduling-related phone calls.”
Mobile Eliminates Data Entry Back at the Shop
Charles Haycraft explains that it is not just the field people that see the value of mobile technology, “Part of the exceptional value of an integrated system with a mobile piece resting on top is that the home office is no longer getting handwritten invoices back from the field. They don’t have to decipher what was written and what services were rendered. All they’re doing back at the office is verifying the correctness of the information and either posting it to A/R to be collected or entering the cash. It really saves a lot of time at the home office, as well as in the field.”
SQL Anywhere Studio – A Local Database
Differentiates Handheld Applications
Autonomy is a critical differentiator with handheld applications. Connectivity is not ubiquitous; dead zones are common. To be useful, a mobile product needs to continue functioning in the absence of a connection. The SAWIN Pocket PC uses SQL Anywhere Studio’s UltraLite database, a small footprint database designed to minimize memory and system requirements in handheld devices. “A mobile online system utilizes the Internet through cell phone sites.” Says Charles Haycraft, “If you get out of range you lose your connection, so if you are trying to complete something like credit card verification and you can’t communicate, you have a problem. With the UltraLite database, even when they are out of range, the technicians can work the call, create an invoice, and get the credit card information. Once they get back in range all the information is synchronized.”
Rolling Inventory – Trucks Become Mini-Warehouses
A service and repair provider shop has a significant investment in inventory that comes in through shipping and trickles out the door onto the trucks, eventually to be incorporated into a customer’s plumbing or air conditioning system. Inventory in these types of shops can be notoriously difficult to track; the parts are often small and relatively low-ticket items. Tracking these parts is labor intensive, and therefore commonly overlooked in both inventory migration and customer billing.
Service Automation has created a multi-warehouse inventory system for service provider shops, which manages the main warehouse and then treats each truck as a mobile warehouse. As parts are transferred between the main warehouse and a truck, the parts are scanned with the handheld’s infrared barcode scanner and added to the truck’s inventory. Charles Haycraft explains the jobsite process of inventory tracking, “Say they need a part of their truck. If they have the bar coding set up and they have all their parts or their bins bar-coded, all they would do is scan the part, or the bin the part came from, and it would pull that part into the service call, price it accordingly, and remove it from the inventory.”
This dramatically increases the accuracy of the inventory, and even the small parts are accounted for in the final customer billing. This is a boost to both the technician’s efficiency and the accuracy of the bill. The multi-warehouse feature also helps locate key parts scattered across a fleet of trucks and improves reordering the home office stock because it provides a true accounting of the inventory, both in quantity and location.
Wireless Warehouse Inventory Management
SAWIN Professional already contained a popular, mature warehouse inventory management module with advanced functionality including G/L interface, A/P invoice validation, audit trails, stock inquiries, and purchasing histories. Adding handheld capabilities was icing on the cake.
To use the handheld in the warehouse, they set up an 802.11 local area network and connect to the SQL Anywhere database. They use the UltraLite database for some of the inventory tasks that need to be managed through a middleware layer that reconciles information before sending it to the main database. As with the trucks, they can transfer parts and equipment to other warehouses by scanning barcodes on the items. A handheld is especially useful when performing physical inventory because it accurately reads the barcoded product numbers and – for big ticket items – serial numbers. Handhelds also remove the labor-intensive, error-prone intermediate step of transcribing paper tallies to the main system. A Pocket PC with a local database and barcode scanner was an exceptional complement to SAWIN Professional’s existing inventory module.
PocketBuilder – Mobility from a RAD Environment
PocketBuilder is essentially PowerBuilder running on a machine with a small screen and less memory. According to Charles Haycraft, PocketBuilder development does shift the programmer’s awareness to different aspects of the environment, “PocketBuilder has a lot of features that bring value to our product – features like tabbed notebook controls. Tabbed notebook controls are available in PowerBuilder and they are especially valuable in the handheld arena where you work with limited real estate on the screens. Transferring features like the notebook control forward from PowerBuilder into PocketBuilder was a great leap for us.”
Combining PocketBuilder with a SQL Anywhere database puts a PowerBuilder programmer in his comfort zone. The differences are the scale of the target machine and the experience of working in the intriguing area of handheld technology.
Watching an Excellent Product get Even Better
Using handhelds in a warehouse is not a new idea, nor is providing field technicians with handhelds. What does differentiate the Service Automation solution is how it captures the complete picture from start to finish, of all aspects of their customers’ business cycle. What is also interesting form a business standpoint, is Service Automation’s ability to apply Sybase PocketBuilder’s rapid application development environment and existing PowerBuilder skills to quickly and economically develop a handheld extension to their existing, successful PowerBuilder product suite. In many ways, Service Automation mirrors PowerBuilder. As PowerBuilder adds new capabilities to track with evolving technology, Service Automation can quickly and affordably take advantage of these new advances using a familiar rapid application development environment.
Article reprinted from www.sybase.com