Cleshar Contract Services

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Background

Cleshar Contract Services (CCS) provides contractors to carry out engineering work for London Underground.  Their engineering hours window is normally less than 4 hours.

Safety is paramount and the recording system that ensures that contractors have left the tracks and returned to base is critical.  Reducing bottlenecks and increasing efficiency has a direct impact on the amount of time available for engineering work.

A group of 6 can easily lose an hour's productivity by queuing for access to an operator who can only take one call at a time.

Requirements

CCS needed to automate their business processes as much as possible around the tracking and management of their personnel across the London Underground network.

Previously, the procedures in place required staff to call from a London Underground telephone and speak to an operator within the offices of CCS.  The operator then recorded the progress and procedural navigation manually.  CCS expressed an interest in automating this process so that the personnel can utilise a fully automated IVR and have the progress of all personnel tracked and displayed through a web application and integrated into their internal systems.

Ultimately the aim was to deliver an automated IVR and web application that would dramatically improve the efficiency of CCS' business processes and lead to cost savings. They had explored this idea with other companies in the past, but were unable to find a satisfactory solution.

Solution

Britannic has developed a hosted IVR and Online Workflow Monitor which allows 300 CCS safety critical contractors to input their shift information remotely via an automated system, without human intervention. The system records and monitors that all workers have clocked in and out from their working location enabling the track to be handed back to London Underground.

The solution provided is a service, provisioned through Britannic's unique netX hosted SIP exchange platform and served directly from a fully resilient, secure data centre within London.

Collection of this data is a mandatory requirement for the Safety Critical Licence. This requirement was previously being fulfilled manually, but is now operating automatically, introducing a host of business efficiencies.

"The introduction of the system has had a major impact as we now trace, via a real-time display, all movements of operatives.  The system allows simultaneous calls, which has eliminated the queuing of old and most importantly, the data recorded is now downloaded after each shift allowing us to record a raft of information previously unavailable at such short notice."

Tristan Martens, Senior Compliance & Performance Manager, CCS Group Plc

The manual system was time consuming and labour intensive and meant the office staff had to be allocated to handle these enquiries, when their skills could be better utilised elsewhere.

An automated system allows engineers to speed through the process in under a minute and their data is then collated into an online system. Previously the data had to be manually entered into the system by four staff and the data wouldn't be received for several days. Now it is received in twelve hours.

"We are extremely pleased with the system and have demonstrated its uses to a number of senior delegations from London Underground, Tube Lines and the Office of Rail Regulator. All have left visibly impressed."

Tristan Martens

For health and safety reasons it was important that supervisors had visibility of the engineers' whereabouts and visible warnings if they hadn't logged off-site within the expected timeframe.

The manual process involved making a phone call to each of the sites and checking that all workers were clocked in and out. Britannic provided an online tool that can be accessible anywhere, and therefore could easily be monitored away from the office as this work is usually done out of hours.

Implementation

Britannic operates to PRINCE2 project management standards to ensure projects are fully scoped and implemented on time and in budget.  Britannic met with the key contacts within CCS to fully understand their requirements and objectives. A Scope of Works was drawn up and agreed.

The project required extensive programming and integration and was rolled out in two phases. Once the initial system was in and being utilised there were further ideas for enhancements which were outside the original scope and were implemented in the second phase.

Benefits

• Reduced requirement for office staff to handle out of hours calls
• Collaborative development created a tailor made solution that can be developed further.
• The ROI was demonstrated from the savings in labour costs for the staff handling the incoming calls and subsequently inputting the data. The benefits in efficiencies to the company and our  clients, coupled with improvements in staffing levels and morale, have already demonstrated themselves to be considerable .
• Significant additional savings have already been made on the amount of engineering work time that is actually undertaken each shift.  This reduces the number of nights needed for engineering and, over a year, will significantly reduce the number of hours lost through setup and breakdown.  The ROI on this project will continue to grow over the coming months.
• CCS recognise the business advantages of this and use it as a way to promote their services and help with winning new contracts.

"We work closely with Britannic and have made a number of changes as we find additional uses or tweaks to enhance the ease of end-user use.  We are extremely satisfied and look forward to continuing our business relationship with them."

Tristan Martens