Since my last post, the helpdesk has gone live on the service module – so we are now logging calls using Solarvista. As I mentioned in a previous post, we had planned to have all the data entered prior to going live, but this just has not been possible. The data is ever changing; contracts expire, new customers are created, equipment moves around. So, with the co-operation of the helpdesk team, we went live with incomplete data – and it seems to have worked!
Okay, there have been problems (some of which are still not fully resolved) but the helpdesk team have been understanding and professional through-out the whole exercise and have adapted well to the new procedures.
One of the key issues has been the length of time it takes to raise a service call – our old system (although basic by comparison to Solarvista) was fast. It presented the user with the information they required all on one screen. Solarvista is different; there are more boxes to tick, more information fields to fill in, which slows down the logging process significantly.
We have also managed to go live with the mobile solution. We have rolled out to 80% of our field service engineers – which is an achievement, but this too has not been without its problems;
It has also been difficult for some of our engineers to adapt to the technology, we knew from the outset that this may become a problem, but after a few days of playing with the PDA and realising that they can’t really do too much damage if things go wrong, they seem to have settled in to using the system quite well.
There have also been issues with the system itself:
* The mobile transaction service was flaky to begin with; this was down to local user admin rights on the server – easy to fix, but it took time to establish the real cause. Solarvista were reasonably helpful in determining the fault, however, it is worth pointing out to anyone who may be contemplating the installation of a similar system (i.e. a customer managed implementation), Solarvista do not offer support on SQL or Server related issues – I understand the reasons why of course, but it is infuriating when in the case of a problem which has obviously been encountered on previous installations, the resolution is not immediately forthcoming. I feel that a knowledge-base of known pitfalls would be invaluable in cases such as these.
* The information displayed on the engineer’s timeline Gantt chart was inaccurate. Again, the resolution was simple to implement, but the fault manifested itself in such as way as to give the impression that calls were completed prior to the engineer attending them.
* The mobile solution was hanging every 13 seconds. Apparently, this was down to the software trying to run a GPS application which we are not using. Solarvista supplied us with a re-compiled version of the mobile solution which excluded the link to GPS software, however, there was a delay of two weeks in resolving this particular issue, which although not critical, did delay the roll out of the PDA’s to the engineers.
* There have also been issues with stock. The engineer’s personal stock enquiry function and the general stock enquiry functions did not work.
* And recently, the ability of the engineer to suspend a service call was lost.
This last problem, losing the ‘End Job’ function appeared at first to be a training issue, as it had been reported by an engineer who had only just begun using the mobile solution. But upon further investigation we found otherwise. One of the features of Solarvista is that once
a service call has been accepted by an engineer, he remains in control of it until the action is completed; this compounded the issue with the ‘End Job’ function, as the engineer had begun the call, but was unable to complete it, causing the call to become locked in an endless
loop within the system. The process for releasing the call was long winded – but eventually we managed to regain control of the call and suspend it manually, but this still left us with the problem of why the option was no longer available. We rolled back the mobile version to
one which was known to have worked previously – without success. In the end, I had a poke around the server and found an option relating to the ‘End Job’ function, un-ticked the box and all is now working.
Solarvista, for their part were reasonably helpful throughout all of these problems, but it is becoming obvious that their perception of a priority issue differs greatly from ours. Solarvista have various levels of call priority – over and above the usual High, Medium, & Low. We went through a stage whereby all of the issues we raised were logged by Solarvista as “medium priority software usage” queries,
instead of the “high priority” status which we thought they deserved. This mis-understanding has now been resolved and I am pleased to say that the majority of the problems mentioned have now been resolved to some extent (there are workarounds for others) and we are expecting that the outstanding issues will be resolved in the next service pack.
