British Gas spends £10m to improve efficiency in field

British Gas is investing £10m over three years on software to improve the way that it allocates jobs to its engineers and enhance customer service.

The new tools will allow the company to dynamically assign its 8,000 field engineers with the 7m-8m requests it gets from its customers every year.

Dominic Shorrocks, head of transformation at British Gas, says the software from a.p.solve will lead to better customer service and improved efficiencies within the firm.

'One thing that's become clear to us is that this tool, which automates the way that people get sent out, makes us more effective in deploying resources,' he said.

Over the past decade British Gas has been undergoing a fundamental transformation in the way it operates, expanding the range of services it provides and moving towards being a provider of home services.

From a process point of view, it has moved from being a complex and decentralised organisation to an increasingly automated business.

In 1996 it started rolling out laptops to its 8,000 field engineers to remove the need for them to check in at regional depots every morning to pick up a work schedule, and improve their productivity.

Now the company is focusing on improving their efficiencies even more, using an advanced automation application called Taskforce from a.p.solve, to allocate engineers to jobs, in real time, in the most efficient manner.

'Laptops improved the efficiencies of our engineers, but this is about making the people in our offices more effective,' said Shorrocks.

'We're about better service to customer. This application will help us achieve our goals. It's not about cost cutting, it's about improving our service as we sell more and more products to more customers.'

Peter Brickley, chief information officer of parent company Centrica, added that the software will completely redefine its customers' service experience.

'Taskforce will synchronise the resources in our business from the call centre through to the field.'

Last June Centrica announced that it was spending £450m on customer relationship management across subsidiary companies British Gas and the AA, with the hope of achieving annual savings of more than £100m.

See also:

British Gas extends its mobile systems

Refreshes service engineers' laptops  06 Aug 2003

Centrica commits £450m to CRM plan

Services giant targets £100m annual savings from customer initiative  04 Jun 2003

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