Swale Heating Ltd, the largest independent heating maintenance provider in the South East has successfully replaced the software which runs it’s business with the market leading Optimatics from Aeromark.
Swale Heating who look after more than 130,000 properties and directly employ over 280 Engineers, sought to replace it’s multiple systems with fully integrated market leading software that offered the very best in advances in technology.
Steve Parish, Chief Information Officer at Swale said “Swale has seen considerable growth over the last 5 years and we recognised in 2015 that we needed to invest in the very best software and mobile technology to prepare us for the next 10 years.
Following a market search, we identified Optimatics as being the transformational product we were looking for and we built a team with Aeromark to implement the replacement system”.
The new service management software not only replaces a number of existing legacy systems in one application, but also streamlines all the processes within the business into agile workflows.
As a result, Swale expects to achieve an increase in productivity for the engineers through improved scheduling and far better statutory compliance especially with associated record keeping, whilst further improving its customer service experience and “first time fix” rates.
“The system has some really clever technology especially related to parts sourcing. Once the Engineer has diagnosed the fault at the click of a button on their tablet the mobile app opens up an exploded diagram of the boiler, the part is identified and the app then sends the order to be automatically price and availability checked against all Wolseley UK depots . Depending on the travel time to fetch the part and the cost, the system seamlessly orders the part for immediate collection. We expect this feature alone to improve our first time fix rates considerably” said Steve.
One of the other key benefits of the system is the way that reporting is delivered.
Whilst the product is delivered via Software-as-a-Service providing all the benefits of this modern technology, the architecture provides for a real time on-site database for management reporting.
Phil White IT Manager at Swale said “The way Aeromark deliver their reporting is really useful.
The core application is Web based but we have a real time mirrored copy of the data on site which allows us unrestricted access to all the data.
This means that in no time at all we were able to build our own report suite which delivers exactly what we need, which will allow us to deliver information the business demands in the future”.
