The Shrewsbury-based company supplies IT and communications solutions to western organisations, particularly in the oil and gas sector, in those regions. It has selected the browser based management system, Service Centre, from Tesseract Technical director Gary Steer said that running operations in these often remote locations has been plagued with difficulties. ‘Generally, we look after all the things you would find in a normal UK office, except they’re in the middle of the desert,’ he said. ‘All of our local offices have questionable internet connections – getting a 2Mbs link, as you would in a traditional system, is just not going to happen. So a solution such as browser-based Service Centre 4.2 that offers a Web solution was a killer application for us.’ The integrated modules include Customer Assets, Call Control, Parts Centre, Repair Centre, Quote Centre and Prospect Centre. The system can accommodate every type of mobile communications technology for remote engineer and customer access – including laptops, Nokia devices, WAP phones, XDAs, BlackBerry communicators and tablet PCs. ‘Service Centre was also attractive because of its multi-currency and multi time-zone capabilities,’ added Steer. ‘Time zones can make it very difficult to keep track of what’s going on. There may be 10 hours difference between the UK and one of our remote offices, so they are not even operating in our working day, making it complicated when it comes to allocating work. With Service Centre 4.2, we will be able to see what jobs have been allocated to all of our engineers for the coming day and plan workloads without having to talk to each engineer directly.’ Hermes has brought in the Tesseract software as a replacement for its Pearl-based ticket systems which, he adds, were also very lax when it came to the handling of purchase orders. ‘We will have far more command over our billing now. Tesseract will enable us to integrate all of our purchase orders in a project-based manner, so everything is tightly controlled, from scheduling to final billing.’
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