The Leading UK Utility Company Now Using @Road Taskforce to Automate Scheduling and Dispatching of About 6,500 British Gas Field Engineers
IPSWICH, UK and FREMONT Calif. (February 7, 2006): @Road®, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARDI), a global provider of Mobile Resource Management and intelligent field service automation solutions, today announced that British Gas, a Centrica company, recently completed the deployment of @Road Taskforce™ to optimize the service delivery of about 6,500 company field engineers. British Gas added field engineers to the Taskforce Field Service Management solution at a rate of approximately 350 each week and completed this phase of the Taskforce deployment in October 2005. British Gas is expected to add additional field engineers on to Taskforce after it completes the company’s pilot program of the @Road software within the company’s Electrical and Housing Services divisions. British Gas is currently the market leader within the UK energy sector with more 11 million residential gas customers and 5.9 million residential electricity customers.
British Gas selected the @Road Taskforce Field Service Management solution over other software applications based on Taskforce’s ability to automate the end-to-end service delivery management process and its ability to scale to a large number of field engineers and work orders. On average, British Gas engineers handle approximately eight million service requests annually.
“Our goal is to set the industry standard for superior service and value in the minds of our customers,” said Andy Burling, Head of Planning & Development, British Gas Services. “With the deployment of @Road Taskforce, we wanted to further automate the way work is dispatched, improve the productivity of our engineers in the field and build on our customer service-driven mentality.”
British Gas made the decision to increase the number of field engineers receiving and completing work requests through Taskforce following a successful trial program using the @Road Field Service Management solution.
The @Road Taskforce Field Service Management solution is part of the @Road family of Mobile Resource Management solutions designed to help businesses large and small optimize the field service delivery process by automating the management of their mobile workers, their mobile workers' work and their mobile workers' assets.
Taskforce is used by some of the world's leading telco, cable and utility service providers and is designed to automate field service delivery processes from appointing, scheduling and dispatching to capacity planning. Taskforce is designed to go beyond human decision-making capabilities, coping with the complexity and changeability of today's field service delivery environment by enabling businesses to achieve a predictable, reliable and repeatable customer experience from commitment to service fulfillment.
The underlying technology in Taskforce makes use of artificial-intelligence algorithms designed to coordinate people, skills, resources and inventory, and which continually seeks to optimize the field service delivery solution at a given time. Because Taskforce is highly automated and intelligent, it can assist a single operations manager to handle a number of complex service delivery needs and requirements in an unpredictable field service environment.
By providing an up-to-the minute view across the entire field service resource network, Taskforce is designed to enable customers to meet both fixed and unplanned service commitments, synchronize call centre and field service operations, reduce service delivery costs and exceed customer service delivery expectations enabling companies to deliver improved customer quality of experience, more efficiently and less expensively.
About @Road
@Road, Inc. is a leading global provider of solutions designed to automate the management of mobile resources and to optimize the service delivery process for customers across a variety of industries. @Road delivers MRM solutions in three key areas: Field Force Management, Field Service Management and Field Asset Management. By providing real-time Mobile Resource Management infrastructure integrating wireless communications, location-based technologies, transaction processing and the Internet, @Road solutions are designed to provide a secure, scalable, upgradeable, enterprise-class platform, and are offered in on-demand software delivery, on-premise or hybrid environments that seamlessly connect mobile workers in the field to real-time corporate data. The company is headquartered in Fremont, Calif., and has a global presence with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information on @Road solutions, visit www.road.com.
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Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this news release are forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. These factors, risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, implementation of Taskforce by British Gas; ability of @Road to comply with the terms of the agreement with British Gas; the success of the pilot program in the Electrical and Housing Services divisions; the timing of a deployment, if any, in the Electrical and Housing Services divisions; the ability of Taskforce to improve customer quality of experience; and general economic and political conditions. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the @Road Report on Form 10-K dated March 15, 2005, in the @Road Report on Form 10-Q dated November 8, 2005 and in its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
@Road, the @Road logo and Taskforce are trademarks or registered trademarks of @Road, Inc. or its subsidiaries. All other trade names are the property of their respective owners.
In the U.S.:
Bob Stern
@Road Media Relations
T: (510) 870-1360
M: (925) 457-1673
F: (510) 870-1910
bstern@road-inc.com
In Europe:
Tabitha Taylor-Higginson
@Road, Ltd.
T: +44 (0)1473 696343
M: +44 (0)7917 589094
F: +44 (0)1473 696444
ttaylorhigginson@road-inc.com
David J. Lebedeff
Vice President Investor Relations
@Road
510-870-1317
dlebedeff@road-inc.com
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