Seamless Implementation for JLA Limited

The world's largest independent distributor of commercial laundry equipment.

JLA Ltd and its subsidiaries use CS Group’s ServiceDirector and Cognito’s fully managed mobile network to manage their field service operations.

Organisational Profile

As the world's largest independent distributors of commercial laundry equipment with over 30 years experience, JLA are internationally renowned for their total commitment to customers.

The company process over 1,200 service calls each week, using service engineers who work from home all over the UK . JLA support tens of thousands of customers’ sites with the base of installed equipment in 6 figures.

Business Challenge

Steve Burrows, JLA’s IT Director, comments: "We had experience of mobile data before moving to ServiceDirector, so we could clearly identify our objectives in choosing our new system".

Key amongst these were:

• Improving the quality and breadth of data provided to our engineers
• Increasing the scope of call-data maintenance that engineers could perform
• Reducing the amount of paperwork done by engineers and submitted back to the office
• Maintaining or improving our already very efficient call to call-controller ratio
• Increasing the richness and reportability of our service data to enable better analysis and optimisation of our field service operations.
• Enhancing the flexibility of 'contract' types we could support automatically in the system

Solution Deployed

Adopting ServiceDirector has enabled JLA to achieve all of their objectives.

Each of the engineers is now equipped with a hand-held computer which receives jobs from the central system via GPRS. Once a job has been allocated the engineer maintains the job through the call cycle using the hand-held, updating the central system at each stage of the call, until he has concluded the service visit.

Benefits Achieved

Since JLA implemented ServiceDirector they have been able to improve their performance in several respects:

• Improve engineers' work prioritisation
• Enable engineers to improve diagnosis, reliability and productivity by having the sites' service history on the hand-held
• Allow engineers to record used parts directly on the hand held
• Enable engineers to requisition needed parts using the hand-held
• Automate replenishment of engineers' van stocks
• Eliminate the need for paper Service Report Sheets
• More easily identify & escalate 'at risk' calls before response times are exceeded
• Reduce office-based post-call administration
• Reduce invoicing lead-time for chargeable work
• Speed up operator training due to the ease of use of the system.