CASE STUDY / GEAS ENERGIEWACHT

Geas Energiewacht has been established for almost 50 years in Twente and in the Achterhoek regions of The Netherlands, each year dealing with more than 210,000 jobs relating to gas and hot water appliances, mechanical ventilation systems, heat recovery units, refrigeration and air conditioning units, heat pumps and pressurised water systems. Approximately 75,000 retail customers are being serviced by 140 technicians.

INNOVATIVE IT FOR LEAN PROCESSES

GEAS is at the forefront of its market sector with the deployment of innovative IT applications to optimise its processes. Eight years ago, the company started using a digital worksheet for planning which shortened the billing procedure and giving more control over the entire logistical process. This was followed 4 years later with the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV in combination with Prodware PRIMA Suite, thus improving the contract management, logistics and invoicing processes. In 2008 the scheduling of employees was launched using the application ORTEC HARMONY. The exchange of data between these different applications is achieved using the ­Intelli middleware solution.

THE CHALLENGE

Due to feedback from users and customers, there were many areas GEAS still wanted to improve:

• Failure to reliably meet customer appointments
• Customer demand for more accurate time windows
• Reduce the number of people who are involved with planning each job
• Reduce unnecessary mileage by the engineers
• Increase first time fix by the engineers
• Ability to reserve capacity
• A customer portal for rescheduling appointments