Real-Time Remote Reporting for Maintenance Services

Urban Maintenance Systems (UMS) is a specialist provider of Infrastructure Maintenance Services to Government, Local Government and private sector organisations throughout Australia.  UMS has over 160 staff and provides comprehensive Infrastructure Maintenance Services to Road, Open Space, Facilities Management, Graffiti Management and Essential Services Environments.

In order to achieve greater operational efficiencies, UMS required a paperless solution that would eliminate the hours spent daily by its field staff manually filling in paperwork. As well as the additional work required by back office personnel to enter the information into one of the many databases used at the time.  This manual process was compounded at the end of each month, with further manual work required to collate customised job reports, invoices and statements issued to clients.

UMS’s customised application is based on an MS SQL Asset Management Database (DBMS) that interfaces with Blackbay’s Service Connect solution to provide seamless communication of jobs between UMS offices and field staff.  DBMS also integrates with UMS’s Finance One accounting software and a range of UMS client’s existing software suites.  The DBMS allows the tracking of each job's life-cycle from the moment that it is entered into the system by the data entry personnel, through to the client receiving the invoice and the development of the required reports for each job.

The Service Connect Solution enables UMS to deliver two-way electronic communication of jobs with their field staff, using the Telstra GPRS network and the Symbol Pocket PC devices.  Materials, tasks and time spent on the job are all recorded, along with the GPS location of each task.  "Once a job has either been created on the handheld device or sent from the asset management system, it can either be marked as a work in progress or closed when finished.  Administration staff are notified via email when any job comes back into the system and they still have the ability to enter additional items or ‘clean up’ the returned job.  Service Connect also allows us to obtain a client’s signature when closing the job if required whilst in the field".

Currently used by graffiti and building maintenance teams, the Service Connect solution is being rolled out across all company divisions which, Mr. Collins says "…will dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork on jobs and virtually eliminate the number of times crews are required to return to head office to log information".

To read the complete UMS Case Study please click here