One thing Epos Engineers did not want when it looked for a service management software solution was a system that would sit on its own server, saddling the company with the costs and infrastructure of an IT department.

“The prospect of installing a solution that would be time consuming, expensive and add to our administrative overheads was something we were not willing to entertain,” says general manager Paul Maliszewski.

The upshot was that Epos, a leading service company to the petroleum industry, invested in Tesseract’s browser-based Service Centre 4.2 to replace its manual system.

It is implementing the software via Tesseract’s hosting service – thus minimising upfront hardware installation and IT maintenance costs.

The software embraces a suite of easy-to-use integrated modules (Customer Assets, Call Control, Parts Centre, Repair Centre, Quote Centre and Prospect Centre) and can accommodate every type of mobile communications technology for remote engineer access – including laptops, Nokia devices, WAP ‘phones, XDAs, BlackBerry communicators and tablet PCs.

“We are a young company and had to start with manual service management processes,” Paul Maliszewski continues. “But we are growing very quickly and now need the Web-enabled capability that the Tesseract software gives us.

“That includes real-time reporting from our 20 service engineers, which means we have the benefit of instant updates, instead of long delays and lots of paperwork to process.

“Also, previously our engineers were making lengthy and costly calls back to the office by mobile ‘phone, but with Service Centre that is no longer happening.

“Soon, we will be switching the engineers over to PDAs and that should mean further substantial savings.”

Paul Maliszewski is anticipating major improvements, too, in the way invoicing is carried out, once the hosted system is fully established.

“In addition, we will be offering our customers a portal, so they can monitor for themselves our performance on their contracts, thus providing far greater transparency and reassurance.

“Overall, I have to say that we have a very high opinion of Service Centre 4.2. It’s a comprehensive service package, which is precisely what we were after.”