Smart Engineers enable Smart Site Technology

“Unlike other maintenance companies, we have a fully equipped workshop including welding, prefabrication, lathe turning and milling workshop. Our mechanical and electrical engineers are multi-skilled and can manufacture most obsolete and non-manufactured parts.” David Dunn, UK Contracts Manager.

The question is, how does such a successful company handle the man-power and resources that keeps customers coming back for more?

Dawn Stephenson, Pumps and Motors’ Administration Manager replies: “When a customer calls you need all of their information to hand. If you don’t have the answers they need they can quickly become dissatisfied with your service and ringing them back doubles your effort. We needed to make life easier for everyone and changing from a manual system to software was the way forward. Everything you want to know about a job is in EMIR for everyone to see.”

Pumps and Motors chose EMIR, a dedicated business management system designed for the electro-mechanical industry back in the 1990’s. As early adopters of ERP they have always benefited from a system that is designed around their key needs and industry requirements and a lot has changed in the last 20 years. EMIR is a product that has been continually developed since its inception with the majority of its features created from the power of customer feedback.

As an organisation, Pumps and Motors were like many other businesses, relying on printed paper to transfer information back to the office from remote locations detailing engineer reports, customer sign off sheets, timesheets and materials taken from stock. Such documents then had to be manually typed into EMIR as a separate administration task. Information collected in this way can obviously be subject to delay, lost, incomplete or inaccurate and due to the duplication of effort involved, never timely or efficiently available.

Well now Pumps and Motors are getting smart, Smart Site to be precise. Every engineer carries a phone or tablet device and they are intuitive and easy to use. So now their engineers know where to go, what to do, and all the relevant job info is now easily available from their mobile device direct from the EMIR office management system.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there! With each job are options for: recording of time, mileage activities along with materials used; the completion of safety & service checklists that can be defined in EMIR; taking photographs of the work before and after the job; and finally a signature of the customer’s approval before completing the job. All this activity is performed straight into their phones. Within seconds, the information is then back in EMIR and job costing and invoicing can be taking place. Even when an engineer is working on site with no phone signal, they can still update the job ready for when WiFi or a data phone signal is reconnected and then press ‘Sync’. The important thing is that all of the collected data, costs, photographs and signatures are all in one place, the EMIR system.

Gary Downes, Director of EMIR Software. “iPhones and Android phones are no longer new technology, they are essential data devices for everyone. Pumps and Motors are an established, but forward-thinking customer, using EMIR and Smart Site to realise the instant benefits of a paperless environment and that can only mean a better service for their clients.”

US Software house, Confluent

This year, the EMIR team are also pleased to announce collaboration with US software house, Confluent, specialists in tablet technology designed specifically for the motor rewind and repair industry. At this year’s EMIR conference Managing Partners, Jake Farrell and Evan Chaki discussed how they have become key players in Microsoft’s PowerApps architecture and how this technology is transforming and modernising the flow of jobs in workshops in the US.

Gary Downes, Director of EMIR Software. “Confluent are like us, a specialist producer of this type of technology for the industry, and I’m pleased to announce a partnership that not only makes this software available to our customer base, but a collaboration that has integrated this product into the very heart of EMIR.”

Jake Farrell, Confluent adds, “Our product has been developed and well utilised by one of the largest and most influential organisations in the states and working with the EMIR team means that the benefits of tablet technology in the workshop will soon be realised here in the UK.”

The new Extension, Workshop Routing, relays live information directly from an iPad, Android or Windows device located in the Workshop to the EMIR solution.

Consisting of a comprehensive series of product-specific electronic forms and integrated business logic, Workshop Routing eliminates the delays and inaccuracies of hand-written paperwork to follow items around the workshop. Each stage of the process is recorded and relayed live to the Visual Management dashboard ensuring that every stage of the process is accounted for in the process, live information that is constantly being updated as each task is completed.

“Our customers are demanding more from their software solution. If a business in this sector is looking for growth, improvements in efficiency and accuracy can be found in the processes that they currently employ. It is no longer desirable to print pages and pages of paperwork for each job or task and expect the internal team to make decisions from incomplete information. Workshop Routing takes away the clutter, makes the current situation very clear and gives managers the information they need.” Gary Downes, Director of Solutions in I.T. Ltd, the authors of EMIR Software.

Shaun Sutton, Director, Central Group and another EMIR customer adds, “EMIR has always been a valuable system for us and takes care of the day-to-day running of our business. With Workshop Routing on-board we will extend that process across all areas of our business and ensure our data collection is instant and available.”