Understandably, Mark Medhurst, operations manager of market-leading office and print-finishing equipment supplier BABS International, looks back to the company's pre-Service Centre days with reluctance.

'Everything was held on paper or cards, in terms of how we interacted with customers, apart from limited use of Word or Excel. Even spare parts stocks were recorded manually. Investing in Service Centre has made us far more efficient as a business and it immediately reduced our costs by 20-25 per cent.'

Now, with the Tesseract software, BABS believes it has a fully automated solution to match the best.

'Through our call centre, customers can book a service or maintenance call, and we provide them with an instant order number so they can track the job through to completion, without things getting lost or mislaid,' he adds.

The company, which counts major high street names such as Kall Kwik, Prontaprint, Rank Xerox and Pitney Bowes among its client base, offers three levels of service contract - fully comprehensive; with parts; and preventive maintenance - and it has more than 900 contracts active across the UK.

'You can imagine the amount of paperwork that would generate if we didn't have Tesseract,' says Mark Medhurst. 'And some of our customer sites have five or six items of equipment, so the paper trail would be horrific - and it was!

'With Service Centre, apart from being able to monitor how quickly - and how effectively - we are responding to customer calls, we've also been able to transform the way we manage spares.

'Nowadays anybody - end users, our own engineers, contracted engineers and even other companies - can 'phone in to enquire about a part and obtain relevant information there and then.

'We can key in the part number, see how many are in stock and where they are - in the main warehouse or the engineers' cars, for example - then instantly despatch them.'

And that's a lot of inventory - more than 100,000 replacement parts are maintained at any one time at BABS' head office warehouse in Park Royal, London, amounting to around 4,500 different items.

Out on the road, 24 service engineers, eight directly employed and 16 contracted, deliver the whole of the company's service operations across the UK. Back at base, parts ordered by 4pm are delivered next day.

'Without Tesseract, it took between two and three days,' says Mark Medhurst. 'People would literally have been walking around with bits of paper, searching out items.'

One other area marked out for future improvement is the way in which engineers' jobs are handled. At present, these are drawn up each afternoon for the following day and sent out by email, text or fax. Once engineers have completed calls, they 'phone in to close them out.
 
'Now that we have Service Centre 4.2, which is Web enabled, our next step will be to issue laptops to all engineers, giving them remote access to order parts, close jobs and receive new service calls.

'It also means staff who are presently tied up in dealing with engineers over the 'phone can be deployed to other areas of the business.'

The positive impact that Tesseract Service Centre is having at BABS is recognised throughout the company. Managing director Dick Reynolds has nothing but praise for the way it has helped to add value and greater structure to overall operations.

'The system is brilliant,' he says. 'I judge it by the number of complaints I get - and I don't get any.'