Keri Allan interviews Simon Westfield and Rob Jones, IT managers at AutoRestore, one of the UK’s leading mobile accident repair
companies. S
imon has been with the company since shortly after its inception nine years ago and worked his way up to his current position. Originally an outsourced consultant, Rob came in- house two years ago. Their
most recent project has been rolling out a new work client to their mobile technicians, which they’ve had to juggle alongside other company critical work.
Q: So how did this big project came about?
Simon: Well we were tracking the movement of the technicians’ vans but not what they were actually doing. We knew how long they were spending on the job itself but not how long each individual section was taking; how long it took to put up the rig, to paint panels etc, so we had no real visibility of their day.
We needed to be able to see what was going on so that we could work out what the average job time was and have more accurate details. Through this we’d be able to see which technicians needed extra training, in order to improve their speeds.
So with that in mind, we spoke to Aeromark, the company which provides our van tracking solution, as we knew they could also provide a service that has a PDA client where you can build clever stages into their forms. So we put together a mobile workflow for them and it got rolled out this summer.
Q: Was it a straightforward implementation or were there any specific problems you had to overcome?
Simon: We had a delay with the access point name (APN). Our project formed part of a wider programme of change being implemented by
Volume 22 – Issue 4 |December 2012 5
heroes Accidental
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