The company, a subsidiary of the European electronics giant, which designs and supplies a broad range of traffic control products and services in Britain, was provided with the Xda’s by Cognito, which built and delivered the mobile data software in partnership with the O2 GPRS network. Mick Murphy, Siemens Traffic Control’s service operations manager, said that before the system was adopted, his engineers used to call on mobile phone and make verbal reports to a call centre. However, the system had significant drawbacks.

‘We had some very, very busy times and our operators weren’t able to cope on occasions, so we weren’t operating in real time, which meant…the management of calls wasn’t geared up to pro-actively manage calls on our behalf,’ he added, going on to say that now, with engineers entering their data via the PDA device, the system is updated in real time, allowing the pro-active management of calls through escalations to the new Cognito/Pinnacle service management system.

The company says that it now has over 120 maintenance engineers who can operate work flow programs and diary functionality through the devices which mean they can make real time updates to head office on the progress of a job and any problems that have occurred.

There have been some teething problems, however, and Mick Murphy explained that while the company managed to train most of its engineers within a day, a significant part of the team had to be recalled for re-training.

‘We recognised that about 80% of them [the field engineers] would accept it [the PDA] with that type of training, and the other 20% would probably need a bit more hand holding, so…we monitored them, via the system to determine which engineers were using it fairly well,’ he said.