“As well as helping us to streamline our business processes, digital pen & paper has opened up a wealth of additional revenue opportunities for us”

– John Hooper.

The Challenge.
Design & Manage (D&M) Contractors was founded in the 1960s to ‘Design and Manage’ refurbishment works. It has grown to become a leading general maintenance company, handling everything from repairing a defective lock on a front door, to full external decoration and refurbishment. Its customers include large banks such as Barclays and The Woolwich, hotel chains such as Travel Inn, and many leading bars and retailers such as Beefeater, Marks and Spencer, BHS and Pitcher and Piano. D&M Contractors is fully registered with Corgi and NIC and employs all general trades in-house.

Within the maintenance world, business is often referred through word-of-mouth recommendations. It is therefore critical to respond promptly to client needs and provide a good level of service. To cater to the needs of its growing customer-base, D&M employs over 100 field-based operatives who are constantly on client sites performing reactive and planned maintenance duties.
Processing some 500-700 work orders per week on average, D&M was finding that it was taking too long to process paperwork. Mobile operatives would have to phone in or fax details to the office-based clerical staff so that they could enter job status information into the system. As charging required copies of signed site documentation, this also affected D&M’s monthly revenue stream, as it meant that jobs couldn’t be invoiced quickly.
John Hooper, Managing Director of D&M Contractors comments: “Work orders would typically take two weeks to process. It was too time-consuming, both on the part of our clerical staff who had to update the system, and for our field operatives who would need to phone in if they needed parts. We needed to automate the process so that the job status would be constantly up-to-date and we could have full site information at our fingertips.”

The Solution.
With work orders needing to be signed off by the client on completion, D&M wanted a solution that could automate data capture while retaining its paper-based sign-off procedure. As a bridge between PDA and paper, Destiny’s digital pen & paper solution provided the perfect complement. Engineers enter details onto the form normally and a camera in the nib of the digital pen captures the information as it is written. By ticking the ‘send’ box at the bottom of the form, the captured data image file is sent via a Bluetooth connection to the engineer’s mobile phone, where it can be verified. Once verification is complete, the data is then transmitted to a central server where it is automatically attached to the job record.

Destiny worked alongside D&M to design a new work order form, using a tick-box approach to ensure that details about the job could be accurately captured by the digital pen. Minimal training was required as it didn’t impact on D&M’s existing paper-based.

The Result.
Employing some 70 digital pens to its operatives who perform reactive maintenance duties, productivity has been greatly improved. The data capture process is now completely automated which has reduced work order processing time from two weeks to just minutes. It has greatly streamlined internal business processes. Instead of field-based staff having to leave client sites and phone in to order spare parts, it is now done automatically simply by ticking a box.

John Hooper comments: “The job status now changes dynamically so that office based staff can see exactly what work is complete and what needs to be done. New jobs can be pushed to the relevant skilled workers the instant that they have come off-site, which has greatly improved productivity. The benefits also translate to our customers, who get prompter response and if required, a copy of the worksheet the instant it is complete. The biggest benefit to us is the fact that we can now invoice instantly which has had a very positive impact on our revenue stream.”

Its associated company – D&M Systems – now uses digital pen & paper technology as part of its job tracking systems that it builds and tailors for other service companies.

D&M Systems is creating a full link-up to Sage Accounts, where jobs and costs are automatically updated within Sage. This has ended the ‘double entry’ previously required in operations and accounts packages, freeing up clerical and financial resources. A link is also planned into Sage Payroll, so that engineers’ site times, non-productive times and expenses can be automatically updated.
John Hooper concludes: “As well as helping us to streamline our business processes, digital pen & paper has opened up a wealth of additional revenue opportunities for us. We are very excited about the potential that it has given us. We look forward to building applications that will help bring real value to our current customers and to the contractor market.”


    
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