Pinnacle teams up with Epicor to deliver KBC solution

When Kingston Communications Group was split into nine separate, and autonomous, divisions, Kingston Business Communications inherited the financial system previously used by the entire group, along with an outdated field engineering package. But, though neither suited KBC's needs at the time, a more appropriate solution seemed difficult to find.

At first, that is. Because it wasn't long before the company found Pinnacle's Service Director, which has helped the company move to a new dimension of service management.

But perhaps we should begin at the beginning.

Essentially, KBC's concern was that its legacy system didn't meet the company's strategic or operational performance criteria, because it comprised standalone packages which were unable to interface with each other. This led to a number of problems, most notably a large amount of duplication of data input. Other shortfalls included no job costing or engineering scheduling tool.

Clearly, it was a situation which had to be remedied. Which was easier said than done. Indeed, it was a process which proved far more complex than Kingston had first anticipated. "Although service management was extremely high on our agenda," said KBC's finance director, Paul Hudson, "we were also keen to take the opportunity to rationalise our systems. This meant integrating our sales and financial operations with our field service operation. However, a problem soon emerged in that every serious integrated system we evaluated had, in our view, a weak service management element, while the available service management systems could not provide a seamless interface with the front and back office."

At this stage, after a full evaluation of the alternatives, a suitable system seemed as far off as ever. There was, however, one way forward which seemed to Paul Hudson to be worth exploring. And this was to invite the best-of-breed solution vendors in both the service management and the financial software arenas to integrate their respective systems. This would give KBC the best of both worlds in a single package.

As a result, Hudson approached Pinnacle - known for Service Director - and Epicor, supplier of the exceptionally powerful financial system, Platinum ERA, to investigate the feasibility of integration. Such a process would demand significant co-operation between the two companies, and the resulting system would be specifically developed to meet Kingston's unique requirements. Critical among these were resource planning and management, in a company with an expanding national field service management force already in excess of 100 maintenance engineers.

There was, however, a time issue; KBC had an extremely challenging deadline for implementation. However, such was the attitude of mutual cooperation between the two companies, the newly combined system was ready for demonstration with a fortnight. And the results of this demonstration were outstanding.

"Extensive trials have shown that we will benefit immensely from the Pinnacle/Epicor combination, and we are delighted to be able to take advantage of the state-of-the-art in service management software," commented Paul Hudson. "There is no doubt that the planning, analysis and reporting capabilities of Service Director will help us move into a new dimension of field service management with consequent improvements in business efficiency."

David Cotton, Managing Director of Pinnacle, is - naturally enough - also delighted with the outcome. "It was a certainly a challenging few weeks," he said, "but the working relationship between Epicor and Pinnacle was extremely professional from the outset. Although the resulting integration has been designed in this case for Kingston, both companies are confident that it is a solution in its own right which can easily be adapted to meet the requirements of others."

Epicor Regional Director, Adam Penhale, agreed. "It's extremely pleasing to have succeeded in demonstrating how our solution, in tandem with Pinnacle's Service Director, will address key business requirements for Kingston Business Communications. While the advanced functionality of the applications was obviously key, I believe it was equally important that we were able to prove how well our respective teams can work together. We look forward to working with Pinnacle on other projects in the future."

In fact, due to the success of the new system, Kingston is already considering the viability of implementing a mobile field service management solution. "This is yet another advantage of the Pinnacle product," concludes Hudson, "as it is designed to allow such a capability to be added quickly and cost-effectively."