Hybrid Android mobile application provides better control over field service orders

The first challenge was the amount of time spent by valuable field technicians having to come to the office every day. Previously the team of around 40 AC/DC field technicians were required to come their local branch office every morning to collect their work/service orders for that day. This involved the AC/DC branch Team Leader or supervisor arriving early each morning to first print and then assign each service order/s within their respective field maintenance team. The teams would complete these paper-based forms during the day, building reports based on the data collected from each of their inspections. These paper-based forms were then manually entered into the Sankhya ERP the next day after the technicians returned to the office to collect the next day’s service orders. These paper-based forms were left in the office/s to become the responsibility of a data entry team. Re-entering this data was time-consuming, inefficient and susceptible to errors, this would often cause additional wasted time inside the ERP identifying and correcting data. Having identified that a focused ‘Service Orders App’ could streamline much of the service/inspection process, the second challenge any mobility solution had to consider was the broad mix of mobile devices in Brazil. AC/DC wanted to use their employee’s current devices as a way of minimizing additional investment, which forced a requirement that any app development cover multiple OS’s including Android, iOS and Windows. Therefore, to ensure one development effort could be applied to all device types and to make the maintenance and updating of the various apps as efficient as possible, OneBlink’s Enterprise Mobility Platform was the selected underlying technology.

AC/DC Engenharia Ltda is an engineering and construction company based in Florianopolis, Brazil. They provide services to the electrical generation, transmission and distribution industry. Those services range from project planning and technical consulting, system design and installation, to the inspection and maintenance of measurement and control systems within electrical installations. AC/DC Engenharia employs around 40 field technicians and provides services to many organizations across Brazil’s 26 states and territories. AC/DC is supported by OneBlink’s South American distributor CRE-8 Mobility and has begun its use of the Blink Mobility Platform with its ‘Service Orders App’ tightly integrated with its Sankhya ERP system.