Bradford Community Housing Trust has given mobile PDA devices to its building services team in order to improve its customer service and increase productivity.
Launched in February 2003, BCHT manages 22,000 homes, supported by 1000 staff in 12 offices in the Bradford area. A key part of BCHT is its 50-strong building services team which provides services such as emergency repair, gas servicing, major refurbishment projects and estate regeneration.
Jason Baines, ICT manager, BCHT, said, “We needed a mobile technology that would allow us to change our working practices and make us more efficient. In the past, our building services staff had to come into work every morning to get their lists of jobs for the day, and return to the office after each visit to process paperwork, resulting in much time being wasted while travelling.”
BCHT rolled out 80 MDA Vario II devices from T-Mobile, with mobile connection speeds of up to 1.8 megabits per second and a proprietary mobile data system from Consilium Technologies.
Jason Baines said, “The business improvements from mobile technology have been invaluable. Operatives who are already in the location of the repair no longer need to travel back and forth to identify the actual repair itself, nor do they need to obtain relevant paperwork. Equally, when the repair is complete they no longer travel back to the depot to inform management of what has been completed, instead they move on to the next job after updating the system on the PDA.”
Productivity has significantly increased due to operatives being able to complete more jobs per day, to the extent that BCHT expects the next tranche of 160 T-Mobile devices to be self-financing.
