Utilities Case Study

About Morrison Utility Services

Morrison Utility Services main area of expertise is the provision, replacement, repair and maintenance of utility network infrastructure, for example: electricity substations, water and gas pipes, electricity and telecommunication cables and installation of water, electricity and gas meters on behalf of blue chip utility companies in the UK. Morrison Utility Services is a large company with a large workforce and a variety of clients among the utilities sector. Morrison Utility Services supplies their personnel with smartphone hardware to carry out a range of services. The firm works with it’s own employees but also works with various other contractors and subcontractors.

The Challenge

Morrison Utilities Services wanted to find a cost effective solution to manage the work of its field engineers more effectively, which includes job scheduling, resource management and generally speeding up the amount of time it takes to get info back from their various external teams.

Prior to the adoption of WorkMobile® the firm relied on its own CRM to help it send out 'job packs' to its external workers. These were large costly packs of paper containing job information/ specs and various other paper-forms that were printed off for the workers to fill in and return (typically they contained Job sheets, Time sheets, Health and Safety forms etc.). Only once the engineer sent the forms or documents back, (on average being received up to two weeks after the Job was completed) would it be possible for Morrison Utility Services to provide their customers with an update and confirmation of a job's progress or completion. Crucially this then enabled them to be able to invoice their customers.

This timescale was unsatisfactory and unnecessary, especially as some complicated jobs could take months to complete. There was also the serious issue of missing Health and Safety forms being filled in and sent back from the field. These were frequently either missing, lost or had never been completed in the first place. When such jobs were audited these missing essential documents were causing problems. A solution was badly needed, one that added more speed and efficiency to the service Morrison Utilitiy Services provided, and took the responsibility for paperwork completion and posting away from the field engineer.

After Morrison Utility Services looked at various suppliers WorkMobile stood out as the perfect solution for their many requirements which included data capture, integration to existing systems, ease of use for the engineers and also the ability to create either simple or detailed reports of the data collected.

The Solution

To overcome the challenge, Morrison Utility Services took an already robust WorkMobile system and integrated it into its own on-premise system. Now their on-premise system transmits data (the old 'job packs') to WorkMobile which turns these into electronic forms.

Workers are then sent the information/forms which automatically download to their handset/tablet, this informs them of the job that they have been allocated and gives them a simple and easy way to capture the data on the device and to transmit back job sheets / Health and safety / Timesheets etc to their CRM in real time. On the customised CRM / web portal, Morrison Utility Services customers can view the progress / timesheets / information of the work they have contracted Morrison Utility Services to do.

The delays and uncertainty of their previous paper based processes have now been removed. As Morrison Utility Services commented to us, 'Our field teams can't believe it's so simple to use'.

The underlying success of the solution is its flexibility and adaptability. WorkMobile is compatible and can be integrated with most back office systems. External workers can use the App either on-line or off line which allows our clients to work in remote locations.

Information from CRM/WorkMobile is very easily transferred so that it appears on a user’s device as an electronic form.

The field user can either access a WorkMobile form with certain information already pre-populated (e.g name, address, job details) and complete the form to the point of capturing the customer or site manager’s signature and or any Photos and then transmitting the completed from back to the office. Alternatively it can simply be a blank form that is filled in by the engineer and then submitted back to the office.

WorkMobile is a software solution that can capture not only data, photographs, GPS location, barcode scanning but can also give the reporting capability many modern businesses need; all of these features are available within the WorkMobile App. Morrison Utility Services takes advantage of the full functionality, enabling it to provide a superior service to its customers as well as ensuring that it complies with its own strict health and safety policy.

Since Morrison Utility Services started to use WorkMobile they have systematically retired their existing portfolio of Apps and data capture tools. This has saved them time, money and has resulted in WorkMobile becoming the underpinning data capture solution across their whole business.