Swindon Commercial Services gets fit for business

A new IT management system deployed by Swindon Commercial Services (SCS) is improving the levels of service it provides to citizens while also improving its business continuity capabilities.

As part of Swindon Borough Council, SCS is responsible for providing traditional council services such as street cleaning, social housing maintenance and support services.

Rob Fyfe, Swindon Commercial Services business development manager told IT PRO that, although the previous systems it was using to handle service calls worked well, it needed to find an alternative as a result of system interruptions due to the ageing IT infrastructure managed in-house it ran on and plans for the incumbent vendor to cease supporting the system SCS was currently using.

"We wanted an end-to-end system that could handle logging of faults and costing the work and appropriate materials to handle the fault, all the way through to invoicing the client," he said.

As part of an IT review undertaken to find a suitable software and hardware solution, SCS also wanted to give employees access to mobile handhelds in the course of doing their daily jobs, in addition to an integrated job management system and modern call handling technology.

SCS opted to work with Consilium Technologies and BT as a result of a tender process after the review, because their joint software offering was ready to be implemented immediately and could interface with the organisation's existing systems.

The contract included the introduction of Consilium's Total Repairs and Maintenance Solution, to support over 200 users responsible for a range of council services. The application, which went live in three months during April last year, is hosted offsite at BT's data centre at Bletchley Park and covers financials, and repairs and maintenance of housing stock.

Consilium also supplied Fleetmaster, a vehicle and workshop management system from Southern Computer Systems and Omfax Systems' Keyfax product to improve phone and web-based communication.

In the first year, Fyfe said the new IT systems have delivered operational improvements. These include better overall service performance, increased job completion rates, improved customer satisfaction, financial and service efficiencies, as well as higher Council comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) and housing ratings.

SCS believes that there will be an increase of five per cent in efficiency within the IT department resulting in savings of well over £50,000 in labour costs per year.

It has also helped ensure new levels if business continuity, evidenced during the recent floods that affected Swindon and its council offices. Fyfe said: "I was particularly proud of my team that day, as many left their own properties to help with rescue operations. That wouldn't have been possible without the new system's web-based ability to logon anywhere and continue working without interruption, as well as its use of BT's offsite hosting facility."

Over the coming year, SCS will extend its IT transformation programme to include additional workforce modernisation initiatives such as home working, vehicle tracking and e-purchasing.

SCS estimates that once Consilium's solution is fully implemented it will generate overall quantifiable savings of over £300,000 per annum.

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