Press Release
Centrica Invests £10 Million in Intelligent Field Workforce Automation for 8,000 Mobile Field Workers
a.p.solve's TASKFORCE to help British Gas to enhance deployment of the company's key engineering resources and deliver a step change improvement in customer service performance.
a.p.solve's TASKFORCE will enable British Gas to:
- Increase flexibility to deploy key engineering skills in real time to better meet customer needs.
- Increase business efficiency in line with other major users of TASKFORCE, worldwide.
- Manage efficiently their continued growth in the UK Home Services market.
British Gas has just under 4 million customers with maintenance and repair contracts, and has today signed a contract for an intelligent field workforce automation solution from UK software company a.p.solve The contract is expected to be in the order of £10M over the ensuing three year period. British Gas is the leading provider of home services in the UK, using over 8,000 field engineers to deliver to its customers. The business has grown successfully over the last 8 years, and now provides a broad range of services, covering central heating systems, plumbing & drains, electrical wiring and kitchen appliances.
Following a long and highly competitive selection process, British Gas chose TASKFORCE over all a.p.solve's major competition. The reasons cited for the final selection included the carrier-class software's unique ability to fully automate the complete end to end resource management solution, and enable British Gas to react effectively to the dynamics of the working day within a "safety critical environment. The fact that TASKFORCE could achieve this level of service while reducing the cost base per task did not go unnoticed, and with such a large and complex operation, it is only with the full automation provided by TASKFORCE that these criteria could be met.
Currently, over 50% of British Gas's daily home service work arrives on the same day–mostly between 7am and 8am in the morning–and is semi-manually processed and scheduled. The TASKFORCE solution will enable British Gas to automatically manage real time changes in its daily schedule as they happen, thereby reacting faster to customer emergencies and providing a world class service to the customer at the optimal cost to the business.
Peter Brickley, CIO for Centrica, comments, "The time when providers of essential services could differentiate solely on price has long since passed. We recognised early on that delivering multiple services at the highest quality is the only way to meet the ever increasing needs of our customers. We will use TASKFORCE to build on the values of the British Gas brand and continue to improve our level of customer service. Achieving this key business driver at the optimal cost to the business was at the heart of the IT review conducted by British Gas over the last 18 months. Taskforce will synchronise the resources in our business from the call centre through to the field, and this end to end process management will truly redefine our customers' service experience.Ó Mark Horne, CEO a.p.solve adds, "Centrica is an important win for us as it proves our ability to deliver significant value to organisations using the TASKFORCE software solutions Ð our customers now include the largest Cable, Telco and Utility companies in the UK.Ó
He continues, "Centrica underwent an exhaustive due diligence process, trialling TASKFORCE against all our major competition. We were able to demonstrate a significant performance improvement in each of the criteria evaluated, including better automation, greater efficiencies, higher levels of productivity and most importantly the ability to match, in real time, the available resources to the tasks at hand while achieving world-class service levels for the end user customer.. "
About a.p.solve
a.p.solve enables service providers to deliver superior customer experience while reducing costs and achieving operational efficiencies.
a.p.solve's TASKFORCE solution today manages tens of thousands of mobile workers in telecommunications, cable and utility services industries, enabling organisations to deliver a highly flexible and responsive customer service, at a significantly reduced cost. TASKFORCE provides intelligent, automated and continuous synchronisation of your business resource network to co-ordinate a complex mix of planned, reactive and demand-driven work orders. With TASKFORCE, organisations can ensure right time, first time service delivery that can change the nature of their customer relationships.
Media Contact
Sallyanne Wright
a.p.solve
Tel: +44 (0)1473 696 300
Email: sallyanne.wright@apsolve.com
www.apsolve.com
Jo Timmins/Anthony D'Alton
The itpr Partnership
www.itpr.co.uk
Email.anthonyd@itpr.co.uk
Tel.+44 (0)1932 578 800
