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Mobile Service: Heidelberg introduces PDA's into its Service operation |
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Heidelberg Australia & New Zealand (HAN) will soon be launching 'Mobile Service' - a wireless customer service solution. The launch here in Australia and New Zealand follows the success of this technology in other large Heidelberg Sales and Service units across Europe, United Kingdom and the USA.
Changing markets and customer expectations, along with the growth of Heidelberg’s service offerings have created new demands for HAN, including the need for faster and better communication between our service engineers in the field and our operations centre coordinators and back office administrators. The goal is to enhance and refine response time to customer requests.
What is Mobile Service and how does it work?
Mobile Service is a communications software tool for Service engineers which is installed onto a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). The application receives and transmits data via the mobile telephone network and will be intergrated into Heidelberg’s central operating system (SAP).
The software consists of two applications –mVisit and mTimesheet.
mVisit
mVisit allows the service engineer to exchange important job related information with the Heidelberg Customer Support Centre (CSC) and Service Administration, using Heidelberg’s operating system as the communication platform. This enables the engineer to:
- remotely accept a service order
- view, adjust, and update job schedules,
- view relevant customer data,
- check machine histories.
Information such as labour and travel times, parts used and work performed is entered in via the mVisit function.
mTimesheet
mTimesheet serves to replace the paper timesheet system.
Service engineers currently fill out a paper based service order and the customer signs it off before it makes its way back to the Heidelberg office for processing. If the engineer needs past service information on the machine while he’s on the job, he has to call the CSC to obtain the information from Service Support.
Mobile Service will streamline this process by allowing the Service engineer to have immediate access to the machine history on the PDA. This feature is expected to assist in fault finding time and reduce the call volumes to the CSC by the engineer. Once the job is complete and all information is entered into the PDA, an electronic job sheet is created, detailing times & parts used for the customer to read and sign off on. The customer then has the choice of either receiving the job summary via email or as a fax.
With administration time and efficiency in obtaining vital machine and customer information, the benefits of Mobile Service to Heidelberg customers are considerable.
HAN Customers may find service engineers using this technology in the coming weeks as the pilot project commences. Testing will be carried out in all HAN branches across both Australia and New Zealand. Once networks are fully checked and initial piloting completed, training will be undertaken by all Service engineers across Australia and New Zealand.
All HAN service engineers are expected to be using Mobile Service by the end of October.
The launch of this technology is testament to Heidelberg’s ongoing commitment to world class customer support and the company looks forward to the benefits Mobile Service will bring to its customers.
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