Impact Applications Ltd & Response Maintenance & Building Services Ltd

How can Open Source help to win 40K?

Andy Cornaby runs an award winning company, Response Maintenance & Building Services Ltd., the company has won multiple awards for it's IT solution including the DTI's Ecommerce awards 2003 but it was not always this way.

Andy realised that the building maintenance industry was suffering from an image problem of 'cowboy' tradesman with poor levels of service and poor quality workmanship. The industry was also becoming more competitive and suffering from falling profits. Andy's vision was to change this and provide a quality service with first class employees, whilst of course running an efficient business and generating profits. Andy saw IT as an essential part of being able to deliver his vision but unfortunately IT did not always support the dream. The first IT solution implemented at Response Maintenance in 1996 was in the back office, where work sheets and whiteboards were common place and information from the on site Field Service Engineers was manually entered onto the system. This paper based system had some obvious drawbacks such as duplication of the data capture process and the frustration of waiting for tradesman to get their paperwork in on time. In addition the IT systems far from helping the business became an inhibitor, having no internal IT resources Andy was in a 'do it yourself' position or had to rely on the supplier. As well as having to regularly reboot the Windows server and the workstations due to system crashes he was in the unenviable position of paying 48,000UKP per year in maintenance charges. Andy is made of strong stuff and realised that changes needed to be made, but still believed that IT could help him achieve his goals.

"Zero client", standard web browser, Extranet & portable wireless device

Andy has managed to achieve all this with the help of Impact Applications of Wolverhampton. Andy approached Impact back in 2001 with a vision for his business and they were able to turn this into reality. Impact have a delivered a "zero client" application, where the on-site tradesman access the system via a standard web browser on a portable wireless device.

Using hand held devices from Symbol Technologies and a mobile phone connection from Orange the field service engineer can log all the details of the job as it happens and this information can be instantly accessed back at the head office. In addition an extranet facility also allows the customer to access the information, providing reassurance that the work is progressing as planned and also reducing the amount of traditional; 'chasing' activities that customers do when they need to find out what is happening. 

With no specialised software needed on the client the 'kitting out' for new tradesman is easy, mostly training, and there is no synchronization needed between the client and the server. If one of the mobile devices is lost or damaged Response Maintenance can be sure that no sensitive data is lost with it.

50% improvement in response times, savings of over 120,000UKP and 50% reduction in admin in first year

This integrated paperless system has delivered huge benefit to Response Maintenance. The initial planned cost saving was in the order of 90,000UKP per year but they have far exceeded this. The reduction in waste materials alone has shown a saving of 120,000UKP in one year. The amount of administration needed has been reduced by 50% and the response times improved by 50%. Andy's goals were to lower the cost, increase the flexibility and get control of the business. This has undoubtedly been achieved and Andy can quote one particular anecdote.

Tradesmen traditionally are known to do a bit of work of their own on their days off. This is not normally a problem, however there can be a tendency to' 'borrow' materials from the company van. Rather than trying to put a stop to these generally accepted practices Andy has a novel solution. Now he has full visibility of stock, including exactly what materials are in each van at any point in time Andy can occasionally spring a van stock take with a weeks notice. The weeks notice is obviously working well as to date each stock take has shown exactly the right amount of materials accounted for.

The increased visibility of the business had another unexpected consequence, now Andy was able to accurately view the amount of profit for each job he discovered that a greater than expected amount of work was not profitable at all. Cutting this work out immediately reduced the turnover of the business, which is, on the face of it, not always a good thing, but as this has now been replaced with new contracts that are profitable the business is in a much healthier position.

So where is the Open Source?

Too often people focus on the technology and forget to solve the business problem that they have. In this case Response Maintenance has got the horse before the cart and has a very successful IT solution delivering real benefit to the business.

Andy purchased a solution based on business need, in fact he approached Impact with the problem and together they designed the solution. The technology supplying was not important to Andy, it was the fact that it delivers the results that is important.

Impact designed the solution based around a standard web browser, and the key word is standard. For longevity and interoperability reasons the use of Open Standards and web standard server tools is vital. The solution uses an Open Source web server called LAMP which stands for Linux, Apache, My SQL and PHP. You may not have heard of this but it is Industry standard with 70% of all the worlds web servers being based on a LAMP architecture.

For Martin Taylor Managing Director of Impact Applications the use of Open Source Software is one of the key elements to his business. The use of Open Source gives him no ongoing license fees, reduced development time, greater flexibility and greater interoperability. Martin says of Open Source "It gives us competitive advantage but it does cost. We have to provide time for training and time to attend events, seminars and conferences. It is also important to give something back to the community and so we make sure we answer questions on the forums. The plus side to this is that we often get an overnight response to bugs that we have highlighted."

With regards to setting up the business Martin says "As a Wolverhampton University based incubator company we would have found it harder without using Open Source Software, it would have been too costly buying development licenses for all the proprietary software needed."

From the Response Maintenance perspective Andy Cornaby is now a convert. One of the first things that Andy noticed was that he does not need to reboot the server and workstations once a week to stop them hanging. in fact at first Andy was concerned and rang Impact to ask if he should be doing this as part of the routine maintenance but his new Redhat server has barely needed any attention.

OpenAdvantage identify a way for continued success

The solution at Response Maintenance has been so successful that they have now partnered with Impact Applications to be able to deliver this to other companies under the brand 'Impact Response'. This in turn has lead to increased need for interoperability with other systems and in the case of one large building company the need to integrate with a legacy Oracle database system.

Although Impact had the technical ability to undertake this investigation the amount of business that they had won meant that it would divert critical resources. Luckily for Impact they reside in the West Midlands and were able to call upon the help of OpenAdvantage.

OpenAdvantage are the first vendor neutral Open Source support centre in the UK and are funded by Advantage West Midlands to help boost the efficiency of businesses in the region by the use of Open Source Software. The experts at OpenAdvantage were able to provide the expertise required to link to the legacy Oracle Database and ensure the continued success of Impact Response.

Links
www.response-maintenance.co.uk
www.impactapplications.com
www.openadvantage.org