After six weeks of using mobile working software from 1st Touch, North Ayrshire Council reported that it had reduced the cost of its responsive repairs by 22 per cent. The 1st Touch system links the repair workers’ PDAs with the council’s OptiTime dynamic scheduling and ROCC contractor management systems.
The new integrated system allows the council’s responsive repairs team to carry out more jobs with its existing staff while reducing the number of agency staff and vehicle hires.
John McClure, project manager for building services, North Ayrshire Council, said, “In the current economic climate, we want to explore ways of achieving greater efficiencies, and in conjunction with OptiTime, 1st Touch has helped to boost the efficiency of our responsive repairs operation.”
Wakefield and District Housing’s mobile surveying Wakefield and District Housing has taken the first step towards enterprise-wide mobile working with the deployment of 1st Touch for its property and land surveyors, with a view to supporting a £720 million improvement scheme running until 2012 across its 31,000 properties.
Louise Muirhead, senior business analyst, Wakefield and District Housing, said, “We needed to identify a new mobile solution for the surveying function first of all as the existing PDA system we had couldn’t integrate with our back-office system. In addition, we still had some paper-based forms and spreadsheets and we needed all this information to be integrated, accessible and viewable in one location.
“Having seen the system in use at a reference site, we were impressed by the easy-to-use mobile application builder with a graphical interface that allows the design, creation and modification of forms without having to return to the supplier and pay more. There was also proven integration with our existing housing management system.”
WDH reported that the 1st Touch system performed particularly well on its real-time test environment, including the mobile system’s ability to integrate with WDH’s back-office systems.
Muirhead concluded, “Ultimately, we can see how 1st Touch can be easily rolled out across WDH to areas such as responsive repairs, maintenance and inspections. In all, we can see that over 200 workers might ultimately use it. This would help us achieve significant productivity gains and improve efficiency right across the organisation.”
