Service engineers permanently online

With 19,000 homes, Woonpunt is one of the largest corporations in Limburg (The Netherlands). The organisation consists of three branches and their area of operations covers the whole of south Limburg. The Maastricht & Mergelland branch works with an advanced system that means problems can be dealt with as efficiently as possible.

Better Customer Service Marcel van Nunspeet is responsible for coordination. He explains, “Tenants of Woonpunt Maastricht & Mergelland are able to report a technical problem with just one telephone call and can make an appointment straight away. Our Customer Service staff will ask questions to find out what exactly the problem is, otherwise our engineers run the risk of having to make two visits because they don’t happen to have the right screw the first time round. The Customer Service department can see on the computer which engineer is in the vicinity and immediately arrange an appointment. In the past, the engineers had a dashboard computer in the car on which they received their assignments, but that has recently been replaced by a PDA.”

With a PDA, planning is truly an online phenomenon. Mr Van Nunspeet: “the engineers can immediately see if anything has changed. The link to the engineer is via GPRS, a permanently-open data connection, so there’s no need to log on. Navara has made a link between the database and the PDA for us.” Navara is used for the link. This is a software platform that enables us to develop user-friendly applications very quickly and this makes them easy to connect from the database to the PDA of the engineer in the field.”

Remote modifications To make modifications in the PDAs remotely from the database in a proper manner, a separate server is required. Mr Van Nunspeet says, “The computer is not with us. It’s all arranged by RAM. The data traffic actually runs from our Customer Service department via Navara to the PDAs and back again.” According to Mr Van Nunspeet the first test went well. “We were able to replace the dashboard computers within a week. Now, everything is running very satisfactorily and the engineers and Customer Services have access to information through the connection. We hope that customer satisfaction will increase as a result. That, after all, is what we’re doing it for.”