South West Water has selected Manchester-based WorkMobile’s award-winning mobile data capture solution as a key platform in its mobile workforce toolkit.
One of the leading providers of water and wastewater services across a population of 1.7 million, South West Water has adopted the WorkMobile tool to improve its methods of data collection and assist with a range of operational activities, having identified the additional capabilities the system provides.
The utilities firm initially collaborated with WorkMobile on a variety of small, specialist projects within the company, and was particularly impressed with the agility of its solution, and the resultant speed of design, development and deployment of the tailored products.
These initial projects included taking a new approach to development surveys which meant that surveyors no longer needed to go to a depot to receive work, print diagrams and create reports. All of this was completed using the WorkMobile application. Ultimately this resulted in customers receiving their reports within a few minutes of the survey being completed and in significantly improved team productivity.
These improvements in efficiency and service meant that the solution has been enthusiastically adopted by employees doing a variety of tasks, with an end user survey providing excellent feedback.
Following the success of these early projects, South West Water has decided to significantly extend the use of WorkMobile’s technology throughout its organisation, to supplement and complement its core IT systems. Applications include undertaking pollutions surveys at point of first response to provide all those who need to manage events with the detail they require, such as photos and videos as well as sound files and speech to text, and creating repair surveys for promoting contractor work, such as for customer leak repairs.
WorkMobile’s flexible application allows businesses to create mobile forms relevant to the specific job in hand, including site inspections, health and safety forms, time sheets and site surveys.
Using a digital form to capture this essential information reduces the risk of data being lost or incorrectly collected, enabling businesses to meet compliance requirements. The app, which allows data to be captured and analysed in real-time, can be accessed via users’ smartphones, tablets, laptops or PCs.
A South West Water spokesperson said “After completing some initial projects with WorkMobile, we have been really impressed with their development team. During the Covid pandemic, they have enabled us to implement remote working rapidly. We are looking forward to taking further opportunities to improve efficiency and service across the wider business.
“The WorkMobile team has made it possible for us to quickly roll out the solution across our employee devices and aided our ability to record, save and share data from site visits. We now have a solution that allows data to be captured more accurately, meaning that we can present clear and concise reports to both our internal and external clients. By rolling out the solution to additional teams across our business, more will benefit from this ease of data capture every day.”
Andrew Huntly, CEO at WorkMobile, said: “Site visits and inspections are essential in ensuring utilities services are provided to customers to meet a consistently excellent standard. Having a tool that allows you to accurately record, save and share data whilst out on site, was a clear benefit to South West Water when choosing to adopt our solution.
“Having already worked with the provider throughout 2020, the expansion of our digital tool across the South West Water network will help provide a flexible toolkit to facilitate new capabilities to enhance our data capture capability and speed up the process of getting essential information to those that need it.”
