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magazine
Digital Solutions
Any business handling large amounts
of cash can be in serious trouble if
something goes wrong with the vault,
safe or strong box where it keep its
money. At worst, it won’t be able
to open for trading or lock up and
go home at night. Fast and reliable
response from security equipment
experts is therefore critical, as is the
knowledge that a problem has been
fully resolved.
To give its customers just such
reassurance, bank security and cash
handling specialist Gunnebo has
dramatically speeded up its reporting
processes using a mobile data capture
solution from DestinyWireless. Based
on technology developed by Anoto, the
system uses specially designed paper
forms and digital pens that capture
handwritten text in a digital format at
the same time as writing in ink. Digital
data can be transferred almost instantly
to head office via a Bluetooth-enabled
mobile phone.
Quick response
Imagine the potential business impact
of a jammed lock, a broken key or a time
delay that stops working. Preventative
maintenance programmes should make
such occurrences less likely, but even
so many high volume cash businesses
– including major banks, supermarkets,
high street retailers and cash-in-transit
companies – rely on the swift attention
of Gunnebo engineers.
Many impose SLA response times
of less than two hours anywhere in
the UK and have similarly demanding
time-scales for getting a fault rectified,
closed out and reported via an online
portal. Information in these reports is
also critical for analysing job frequency,
different types of faults, response
times, fix times and first time fix rates,
knowledge of which can greatly reduce
costs and improve service levels.
Gunnebo’s 50 engineers, each of
whom makes four or five calls per day,
are therefore under great pressure to
arrive promptly, resolve problems and
report back to the office as quickly as
possible. In the past, using a conventional
paper system, engineers would complete
a job sheet for each visit and then call
the Gunnebo service desk to tell an
administrator about the problem, what
action was taken and anything else that
needed to be done, such as ordering new
parts.
This was historically the quickest way
to give the service desk the information
they needed to update the online portal
and close out the job. Paper job sheets
would be posted back to head office by
the engineers much later – often with a
delay of up to a week.
TonyWortley, Gunnebo’s Service
and Logistics Manager, Secure Storage,
could see the drawbacks of this situation
only too clearly.With phone calls taking
ten minutes or more, engineers were
spending up to two hours a day on the
phone, including time spent waiting to
get through, delaying the start of their
next job; the volume of calls created
a bottleneck on the service desk and
risked preventing staff from handling
emergency service calls from other
customers; and there was the risk of
errors through misheard or wrongly
interpreted information.
At the very time TonyWortley started
to look for a more efficient process, a
potential new contract with a major
high street bank was on the
horizon. The large amount
of data and number of
sites involved meant that
to service this contract
in the conventional way,
Gunnebo would have had
to take on eight new office
staff and 20 more field-based
engineers. Instead, it opted for a
digital pen solution from Destiny
Wireless recommended by a new
management recruit who had had
previous experience of a destiny
system.
One immediate result was that
Gunnebo won the new contract – not
least because the new banking client
had also had a positive experience
of destiny digital pens, in contrast to
poor experiences with PDAs in terms of
connectivity and data transfer.
Ticking all the boxes
“It was immediately obvious that destiny
ticked all the boxes,” said TonyWortley.
“We could see straightaway that it would
dramatically cut down the engineers’ calls
and free up the service desk.We’d get
full and accurate data back from the field
How Gunnebo implemented a digital pen solution to improve
productivity and service levels and achieved pay back in just
four weeks
In safe hands
virtually in real time using a system that
would be easy to implement with almost
no training. The only changes to working
practices would be welcome ones.
“We discounted PDAs because we
didn’t want to ask engineers to be
laborious one-finger typists on something
no bigger than a mobile phone. It’s much
better to leave this to the administrators
who can type fast and well straight
onto our customers’ portals. Another big
question was the customer’s signature.
The unrecognisable squiggle you get
on a PDA just isn’t good enough when
you’re dealing with critical security issues.
And as far as data security is concerned,
the 256 bit encryption of the pens and
automatic deletion after transmission
meant we didn’t have to worry about
losing sensitive information.”
As a first step, Gunnebo redesigned
the job sheet into a digital and more
user-friendly format using tick boxes to
cut down the need for writing. It also
created a digital daily diary sheet showing
hours and expenses by job,
An initial pilot with just three users
was scheduled to last a month. But by
the second week the advantages were
so clear that more pens were ordered
to accelerate the roll-out. In the space
of just two months Gunnebo increased
the number of users to 47, whilst also
extending the system to a company it
had just acquired.
Now, at the end of each visit to a
customer’s site, an engineer writes out
a hard copy job sheet as before but with
a digital pen and paper. The customer
uses the same pen to add their signature.
After that, the engineer simply ticks a box
on the form to trigger the transmission
of the electronic data from the pen via
their mobile to destiny’s secure mirrored
servers.Within less than a minute, destiny
continued...