Company

T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutche Telekom AG, is a German-based telecommunications company founded in 1990 in Bonn. T-Mobile is present in Europe, US, Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands and employees 36,000 people worldwide. With an approximately 150 million subscribers, T-Mobile International is the world's twelfth-largest mobile-phone service provider and the third-largest multinational.

T-Mobile entered the Croatian market in 1999 after acquiring 35%, and latter on 51% of the first Croatian telecommunication operator - Hrvatski Telekom. In 2010 these two companies merged into one company under the name Croatian Telecom and with total number of 2,9 million users reached total revenue of 1,5 billion euro in the same year. Croatian Telecom carries T-Mobile brand in the mobile business, and T-Com brand in the fixed business.

Business structure

T-Mobile Croatia has 550 telecommunication technicians covering entire infrastructure of T-Mobile Croatia with more then 2,9 million users and 1,43 million phone lines. Each of the numerous service centers in Croatia has a team of service technicians who are divided in a two main segments of field technicians' work:

• Public technical service team - installing, modifying, maintaining and repairing telecommunications equipment at homes (modems, ADSL, IPTV etc.), ensuring the equipment and connection to the Internet is operating properly etc.
• Special technical service team - working on remote communications sites installing and maintaining telecommunications and electrical wiring and cabling, installing and repairing communications equipment, recording GEO positions of pipeline wells, communication poles etc.

All field work assignments of these teams are planned in accordance with the submitted complaints and errors forwarded from call-center dispatchers and according to general tasks of each service center. Technician's supervisors are located in service centers from where they coordinate technicians work on the field and provide technicians with all the data, equipment and support they need.
Work orders are created and assigned to field technicians through a robust web based management system - WWMS (workforce workflow management system) which is used both by supervisors and field technicians through their laptops.

Challenges faced

WWMS is a very rugged and rigid system in which doing even a minor changes in the work process would necessitate spending a lot of time and money. Therefore, while the work processes and technologies were continuously progressing, the central system stayed the same. This resulted in huge discrepancies between the work processes needed to be accomplished on one side and the actual technicians' work on the other.

Technicians' work with laptops, on the other hand, revealed some additional problems with managing the WWMS system. Besides stack of special equipment carried in their trucks and work often done on places with limited space and accessibility, technicians were supposed to:

• carry a laptop, photo camera and tons of forms in order to document job related activity,
• keep record of materials and equipment used in the work,
• schedule and coordinate following visits.

With the use of laptops this was very time-consuming and inconvenient since they needed to turn their laptops over and over again, establish wireless connection, log into WWMS, send files and photos to the central system and manage work orders' status. In practice, this resulted that the work orders were not timely updated and supervisors had distorted image of the field work. The conclusion was that manging work orders through laptops requires too much time so T-Mobile decided to introduce tablets in field work.

All this problems urged T-Mobile to examine other possibilities of managing field operations and they contacted Salespod to see if there was a solution for them.

Salespod Solution

Salespod solution was implemented in T-Mobile in a pilot project whose main goals were to:

• replace WWMS system with a system easier to use and
• replace laptops with tablets.

After 3 months of use 95% of field technicians and supervisors declared they want to use Salespod in their work.
Using Salespod system on web application and tablets, T-Mobile technicians and supervisors were able to:

• Create and update work processes,
• Automatize import of work orders,
• Dispatch work orders to field technicians' tablets,
• Integrate other web services on Salespod and, subsequently, have all-in-one solution,
• Create and manage routes and plan visits.

Additionally, Salespod enabled T-Mobile to:

• keep record of materials used in work and avoid laptop connections to SAP system,
• record GEO position of all job related objects and tasks,
• use camera of the tablet to collect photos and send them to the system,
• track technicians' work progress on the map in real time,
• using text messages and billboard notices to communicate with each other much faster.

Benefits gained with Salespod

During the pilot project, technicians and supervisors have recognized the advantages of using Salespod system and even 95% of them voted for the implementation of Salespod in their work.

Summary of benefits gained:

• Most of work orders are CLOSED before the arrival of technicians in a workstation so supervisors have crystal clear picture of all events happening on the field;
• MINIMIZED need for any manual entering and editing of work orders, materials spent in work and uploading photos;
• SPEED-UP work of all teams of technicians;
• AVOIDED hassles with the work on laptops and connection to SAP system: instant start-up of the system, camera is an integral part of the tablet, all web systems are integrated in one solution.
• REDUCED number of returns to the place of intervention.

 

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