The company, which also services and repairs the tools, is using the Service Centre software hosted by leading supplier Tesseract and accessed by Abbey staff through an internet browser.   Abbey's service centre manager Andrew Saxton, said that while the new system was 'marginally' cheaper and offered some efficiency savings, the real driver was, down the line, being able to offer access to customers.  'We want to give customers transparency of their jobs which they can obtain through buying a user licence.’

Running a self service operation is an important ambition for the company said Saxton as it will move the company 'even further up the customer service ladder' and having customers booking their own repairs, will Saxton believes, enable the company to use a just-in-time Kanban delivery process with its spare parts suppliers 'and so reduce shelf stocks and therefore minimise the cost of having parts sitting on the shelves for the traditional 'just-in-case' scenarios'.

The company is shifting from a traditional "on premise" use of Service Centre 4.1, which it has used for four years, to the new browser-based 4.2 system.  And the fact that the company has been with Tesseract for some time eased the decision making process.  'They have a decent support operation and have never let us down so there is no reason to believe they will now,' said Saxton.

Tesseract will house the system and be responsible for its maintenance.  'This will gives us reliable access to professional support 24 hours a day.  Even with the best will, our external consultant can not always get on site when needed.' 

In terms of cost savings he said:  ‘We have been able to replace the internal sales department which has saved cost,' he said.  Other savings are expected in reduced stock 'simply because pending repair schedules will be more visible and replacement parts will therefore be requested on a just-in-time basis,' he said.

Under the deal the company pays a fixed monthly fee per user to Tesseract to use the system.