Winner: Tennant Company

Project: Field Service

Business goal: To automate engineers' administrative tasks

Project partner: Dexterra

Before Tennant Company, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cleaning products and equipment, implemented its mobile device solution, its service engineers were bogged down by the paper-based business processes that accompanied their core work.

The company sought a mobile system that could liberate these engineers from this paper work by automating many of their administration tasks, allowing them to concentrate on the job of fixing machines and serving customers.

Tennant worked with mobile solutions provider Dexterra to deliver a mobile platform that could hook into the company’s customised SAP ERP software. Dexterra adaptors allowed SAP functionality to be ported onto ruggedised laptops that connected wirelessly to the corporate network. Alongside, application interfaces and ‘composite applications’ were specially designed to suit the context in which they were to be used – on the road.

The system allows engineers to use the SAP systems to manage their inventories, create repair quotes, order parts and access inventory information and product manuals from their mobile devices at any time.

The project was swift to implement; it was just 120 days from contract signing to completion, and 180 field engineers across numerous regions had the system in their hands within a month of initial roll-out. What is more, the return on investment that the company has experienced has already exceeded expectations.

Thanks to the new system, 85% of parts orders are now processed automatically: that is 5% higher than the target figure. The cycle from work to billing has been reduced from over a week to between one and two days; the number of errors in data entry has dropped considerably. The system has improved the satisfaction of both customer and employee, with recruitment and retention markedly improved.

Feedback from users has been more than positive. User comments run from “this is the best tool I ever got” to “I don’t know how we ever did without it.”

The Effective IT 2007 judges were equally impressed with the project’s simplicity, efficiency and ability to deliver business benefits within a short time; one judge went so far as to describe the project as “very revolutionary”.

Highly Commended

Foster's EMEA

Australian drinks exporter Foster’s EMEA supports a global distribution channel with an IT team of just three people. In order to ease the management load of its server estate, and to meet expanding requirements for storage, the company decided to employ both server and storage virtualisation, partnering with networked storage provider EqualLogic. In so doing, it consolidated 34 servers down to four, reduced the time spent managing legacy servers by 10 man-hours a week, and saved up to £100,000 in staff costs, hardware savings and power bills.

Mitsubishi Electric

Before implementing its division-wide BI and CPM project, Mitsubishi Electric relied upon the reporting capabilities of its SAP ERP system. However, creating or editing reports from this system required technical involvement, and so reports could take days to change. The company applied BI and CPM tools from specialist Board MIT to support the supply chain, as well as sales and marketing and the executive team. In the supply chain management process, auditing a missed delivery use to take 10 hours; it now takes 2 seconds.

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