Shumate Mechanical provides residential, commercial, and industrial products and services in the air conditioning and heating industry in Atlanta and surrounding areas. In 2004, Shumate began implementing a five-year plan to become electronic, paperless, wireless, and to mobilize its workforce. Rising fuel costs added to Shumate's desire to accomplish this goal as quickly as possible.
"Our customers don't care what sort of new technology we're using," says Frank Steinocher, CIO of Shumate Mechanical. "They only care about fast service and air conditioning that works. But using technology enables us to provide more efficient service."
The company's process for fleet management consisted of manually tracking routes. In Shumate's dispatch center, there was a large map of Atlanta split into four quadrants. One dispatcher was assigned to each quadrant, consisting of a team of 10 to 15 technicians, and was responsible for manually planning the routes of each technician. Each technician visited between 3 and 10 sites per day and had to call dispatch after each site to close the call, review parts used, and report revenue collected. The technician also kept a paper record of work completed and payments collected that had to be turned in at the end of each day. Shumate Mechanical wanted to find a solution that would offer inventory management, fleet tracking, and point of sale for field service using rugged mobile computers and GPS vehicle tracking integrated with Shumate's navigation software.
Everything's cool now.
Source: Integrated Solutions, http://www.integratedsolutionsmag.com