MapMechanics helps ISS cut days to hours on Northern Rail contract

A new mobile workforce solution from MapMechanics that combines routing and scheduling, mapping, wireless communications and real-time satellite navigation has played an integral part in clinching a major facilities management contract for ISS (Integrated Services Solutions) with Northern Rail.

The roll-out is one of the first for the MapMechanics Mobile solution, which has been under development for the past two years, and it is the biggest so far. It includes hardware and software for 52 mobile teams servicing 494 locations including railway stations and administration offices throughout northern England .

This is the first railway-related contract in the UK for ISS, a major international group which provides cleaning, maintenance, facilities management and security services across a wide range of industry sectors. The all-encompassing Northern Rail operation includes buildings, signage and electrical mechanical services. Altogether there are around 850,00 assets in the system.

The contract involves both planned preventative maintenance and emergency response to problems caused by equipment and system failures, breakages, accidental damage and vandalism. ISS not only runs its own extensive mobile teams to handle much of this work, but also manages the work of specialist subcontractors.

David Bucknall, IT project manager for ISS, explains: “We needed a system that would allow us to prioritise call-outs according to the degree of urgency, and plan our response in time bands such as four-hour, one-day, three-day and seven-day. It also needed to communicate the work schedules to our mobile teams, and help them find their way to unfamiliar destinations. And we needed to do all this more efficiently than the previous operation.”

MapMechanics Mobile schedules, communicates and manages the allocation of jobs to the company’s mobile service teams. Its nerve centre is Mobile Commander, which has been developed by MapMechanics to coordinate the whole process. Mobile Commander controls communication between devices, integrating the output from the various elements of the system, which include the TruckStops routing and scheduling system from MapMechanics and the TomTom satellite navigation system.

Andy Liston, contract planner for the Northern Rail contract for ISS, says the system has already delivered many of the planned benefits. “I am able to complete in a few hours and manage what previously would have taken a bank of planners a full day to achieve,” he says. “Being able to transmit directly to the staff ensures there is one overall view of the daily running of a contract, as opposed to the usual form of weekly planning meetings. Centralised control, I have found, has shown a definite upturn in efficiency.”

The mobile teams are mostly outbased, working from virtual “depots” in the area where they live. Most teams work to a fixed pattern of visits around their operating base, but about a dozen operate on a “non-fixed” basis, bringing special skills to bear to provide ad hoc response to unplanned maintenance and repair tasks.

A key function of the MapMechanics Mobile system is to pass each day’s schedule wirelessly to the teams, which it does by means of GPRS mobile data technology. Each team is supplied with a Qtek Windows Mobile-based PDA (personal digital assistant), pre-loaded with a subset of the MapMechanics Mobile Commander software. The schedule is transmitted from the Mobile Commander server to these devices, and they download the relevant schedule and display each job in turn for the driver.

The PDA cradle in each team’s van is equipped with a GPS satellite location device, which links to the PDA’s TomTom satellite navigation software. Mobile Commander passes the call coordinates for each visit to this system, so drivers can be shown the route to the next call automatically – a feature of particular benefit to the non-fixed teams, who may not always know the way to each railway station from all possible starting points.

Calls requesting unplanned maintenance and repairs come in constantly from a variety of sources including railway staff, station quality managers and members of the public who have been designated “station adopters”. Altogether there are around 22,000 calls a year.

The calls are handled by a contact centre using the TouchPaper helpdesk system, which prioritises them according to urgency. Emergency call-outs are dealt with the same day, but the rest are organised into call lists and passed to TruckStops. This schedules the 24-hour visits for the next day, and flags others to ensure that they will be included automatically on another day – always within the time window originally allocated to them.

A key efficiency introduced by the MapMechanics Mobile system has been the ability to integrate planned and ad hoc visits more tightly and logically together, saving wasted or duplicated journeys.

David Bucknall explains: “Because TruckStops can consider all the calls in its database when scheduling visits, it can bring forward or push back visits, providing the priority code allows this. It can slot ad hoc work into a pre-planned schedule, combining several jobs at the same location where necessary, and planning journeys more efficiently.

“This radically reduces the instances where a team might find themselves going to the same place repeatedly for different reasons.”

He adds that although many of the mobile teams now have specialist skill sets (electrical repairs and so on), there is usually enough flexibility in the system to allow them to slot in unplanned work alongside routine maintenance.

An added feature offered by the PDAs carried by mobile teams is the ability to photograph installations and equipment with the camera built into the Qtek units, and transmit the result back to base. “So engineers can take ‘before and after’ pictures to show the work that they’ve done.” Both pictures are time- and date-stamped, and are stored on the central server for consultation if they are required in future.

A variety of software and data from MapMechanics has been selected by ISS as part of this multi-faceted system. In addition to the Mobile Commander server and mobile client system, components also include the TruckStops routing and scheduling system, the GeoConcept geographical information system, the AA 1:200,000 vector road network, and ITIS off-peak road speeds, which are derived from millions of real-life records of traffic speeds taken from vehicles monitored by a GPS positioning system.

David Bucknall pays tribute to the service provided by MapMechanics throughout the project. “We worked together to define our real-world requirements, and they made sure that the system met them. When we hit some setbacks in the early days, they sat round a table with us to resolve them, and after that we haven’t looked back.”

Andy Liston adds: “I have found Map Mechanics to be helpful throughout the deployment of the system, from the initial inception to the final setting up of what has proved to be a revolutionary approach to single solution facility services workflow management.”

He continues: “The products, whilst not child's play in operation, are easy to operate, and crucially, have proven extremely reliable in day to day operation. I would certainly have no hesitation in recommending not only the products but also the services provided by MapMechanics.”

“It’s been a true two-way street,” David Bucknall says. “We’ve learned from MapMechanics’ experience, and they’ve learned from ours.”