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| The Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust Reduces Stock Costs as It Opts for Truly Mobile Technology The Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust has vastly reduced its running costs by dispensing with its in-house warehouse. Instead, the Trust has opted for carrying "imprest stock" on its vans and working in partnership with Buildbase, the builders' merchants. To support the new way of working, the Trust has introduced PDAs using a mobile workforce software solution from 1st Touch for its operatives in the first move towards a totally mobile engineering workforce. Important selection criteria were drawn up for a mobile application vendor with proven expertise in this area and an open rather than proprietary technology approach. The decision sees the Trust reducing its financing commitment to stock from around £400,000 to around £60,000 a year, and eliminating warehousing costs such as rental, administrative charges, breakages and shrinkage. Furthermore, by employing this mobile solution the Trust has been able to rationalise its supply chain, reduce business overheads by £150,000 per annum by eliminating the need for a warehouse with its associated costs, and improve stock control. Once a department of Aylesbury Vale District Council, the Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust has recently been spun off into a registered charity, committed to a huge programme of modernisation and regeneration works. As a newly separate entity, the Trust was required to remove itself from the council's premises, and decided on a new site without a warehouse. Instead, the Trust chose to equip its fleet of vans with imprest stock, which would provide 80% of the parts needed on a day-to-day basis, and adopt a bulk purchasing agreement with Buildbase, facilitated through the Trust's membership of the Procurement for Housing organisation. Today, Trust operatives are using their PDAs to notify Buildbase immediately of stock used on each job, and to place orders for additional parts. Large items are delivered direct to the customer, while Buildbase picks all other replacement parts ready for collection the next time the engineer visits the merchants. The Trust receives details of stock used against job and engineer on a weekly basis. With operatives also feeding back information about work in progress and jobs completed via the mobile application from 1stTouch, managers can view stock orders and tasks in progress in real time. They can even check that safety checks are carried out each morning on the vans. Ultimately, the Trust will adopt more mobile technology functionality and roll out 1st Touch across more operations. In the near future the Trust's back office system will issue job tickets using an automatic scheduler directly to the operatives, reducing the need to visit head office to pick up or deliver paperwork. The solution works by providing on-screen forms for operatives on the PDA, which reflect they way they work and are easy to use. The software application is provided by 1st Touch, a specialist in mobile solutions. The two organisations have worked closely together, and with the provider of the back-office systems, such as Aareon, to ensure a smooth transition to a solution that works exactly to the Trust's needs. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |