 This year’s Service Management Europe show in October marks the emergence of the Britain’s MapMechanics as a major force in integrated mobile workforce planning, scheduling and management solutions. The show runs from the 24 to 25 October at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham , and MapMechanics will be on stand 652.
Now in its twenty-first year, MapMechanics is firmly established and widely known as a specialist in geographic information systems, logistics solutions and associated mapping data products.
The past year, however, has seen a step change in MapMechanics’ focus and product portfolio, in which it has consolidated its proven expertise at systems integration and strengthened its in-house development capability – building up the resource to take on major turnkey projects in field service optimisation, scheduling and mobile computing. This thrust has been seen in major system roll-outs in the course of the year for clients such as ISS and their contract for Northern Rail.
MapMechanics’ enhanced capabilities are reflected in the key presentations on its stand at the SME event, where the company will be showcasing its abilities in hosted delivery planning and management, customised optimisation and dynamic scheduling. It will also be unveiling a fast online address verification system.
At the heart of many of these developments is MapMechanics’ new hosted transport and delivery management system for complex transport operations, which is administered via a secure web portal. This allows users to log delivery requests or orders on to the system via a standard web browser, and then schedules them optimally for delivery, taking account of available resources, priorities, constraints and timing requirements.
A further sophistication of the system is that it offers true dynamic scheduling, which means that schedules can be amended progressively during the day to take account of new orders as they come in.
The system can also incorporate a very fast and accurate online address verification capability. Users entering new addresses can type a postcode or partial address into the browser window, and the system will check the details, complete the address and prevent the user from entering it incorrectly.
MapMechanics has harnessed the latest web technologies to provide the front end for the proprietary address-matching application, including AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). This allows information such as address details to be delivered from the server extremely quickly and fed into an existing web page, which changes to show new data literally as the user types. There is no need for the whole web page to be refreshed each time data changes, as would have been necessary in past web applications.
On the mobile computing front, the company has updated its MapMechanics Mobile system, which delivers complete job schedules to drivers wirelessly in real time, using GPRS to present routing instructions to each call in turn on an in-vehicle satellite navigation system.
MapMechanics Mobile links appointment and order details with in-vehicle navigation, bar-code reading and signature capture on a PDA. Back at the office, each mobile worker and his allocated workload are clearly displayed on a map so staff can track each individual, including arrivals and departures at each call point.
As MapMechanics’ commercial director Chris Greenwood puts it: “Not only does this system ensure optimal use of resources and enhanced customer service and response times, it also adds credibility from the mobile staff’s point of view.”
Alongside these major developments, MapMechanics will also be reminding SME visitors of its strong portfolio of software products in the fields of geographic information, strategic network planning and routing and scheduling, along with its extensive range of digital map data, business data and demographic data for Britain and the world.
All the company’s products and services are detailed in its annual Data Catalogue, an extensive full-colour printed publication that is also available online at the company’s web site, www.mapmechanics.com. |
