Customers: Additional Industries: Benco Dental

Benco Dental is a growing service business focused on ensuring that dental practitioners under their care always have the right equipment to hand. The field service operation installs and maintains a full range of dental equipment. “As our business grows we are committed to ensuring that we continue to deliver high quality service at a competitive price,” commented Rick Cohen, VP operations, Benco Dental. “Our field technicians have always worked hard to deliver quality service—in mid 2003 we decided to invest in SERVICEPower workforce optimization software to help our field organization work smarter.”

ServicePower’s scheduling software, SERVICEPower, was deployed at the beginning of 2004 following a successful implementation project that included integration of the SERVICEPower system to Benco’s existing business applications. “As soon as we began this deployment we started to reap the rewards, ” continued Cohen. “The scheduling solution made a positive difference to our field and dispatch productivity, the consistency of service delivered, and to the control our field management have over the service delivery process.”

The project team, guided by ServicePower’s implementation consultants, was keen to ensure that the Benco Dental field force benefited from the latest advances in mobile technology. The SERVICEPower scheduling application is ideally suited to service environments that exhibit some degree of same day change. Benco Dental is such an environment—jobs often over-run or under-run their estimated duration, and urgent service requests such as a request to fix a broken X-ray machine can appear at the most inconvenient times. The SERVICEPower scheduling system is able to re-optimize on the fly as these changes occur, if real-time job status messages can be made available from the field. By dynamically re-optimizing, the system ensures that a high-quality schedule is maintained, and customer commitments are met even as things change during the day.

Benco Dental chose to complement its SERVICEPower scheduling implementation with ServicePower’s SERVICEMobility application. SERVICEMobility provides wireless dispatch and job status messaging directly from SERVICEPower to mobile devices in the field. Benco Dental chose to equip their technicians with BlackBerry 8703e devices on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) platform. The desire to use a Java-based client platform, the increased security inherent in BES and the ease of application deployment which the BES affords made this the ideal choice for Benco Dental’s purpose.

The combination of SERVICEPower and SERVICEMobility ensures that work is dispatched automatically to field technicians as SERVICEPower creates an optimal schedule. Technicians use the simple SERVICEMobility interface to report job status back to the scheduling system. All of these transactions occur without the need for voice traffic—saving time and money in the dispatch center.
“Our technicians love the SERVICEMobility application, continued Cohen. “It helps them manage their day and they feel “connected” to the HQ operation even when they are in the remotest areas. The occasionally connected design of SERVICEMobility helps insulate our field people from the vagaries of the areas not in network coverage. With SERVICEPower handling the scheduling we know our people are always working an optimal schedule, the system then frees up time in our dispatch center so we can concentrate on exceptions and customer satisfaction issues. The integrated camera has turned out to be a bonus, as initially, we didn’t think we would use it. However, some of our technicians use it to record the details of a particularly tricky fix and compare notes with their colleagues!”

The SERVICEMobility wireless software is now fully deployed to all 250 of Benco Dental's technicians. SERVICEMobility is built upon industrial strength, open, wireless middleware from Konaware. Konaware provides for end-to-end transactional integrity across the wireless connection, mobile device independence, rapid application development, manage-ability, security, administrative functions and air-time control.