The Waldinger Corporation—a leading HVAC, plumbing, sheet metal, electrical, and service contractor with local presence throughout Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri—expected that using PENTA Technologies’ Mobile Field Service application would improve productivity and save money when it came to capturing and keying in information. “What we may have underestimated is the ability of our sales team to use the added abilities to market our services,” said Dave Miller, Waldinger’s senior vice president of Operations. “We have definitely had proven results on the sales and marketing fronts.”
Waldinger’s first mobile experiences were with the original Windows® version of the PENTA Mobile application, which were running on a small handheld device, the ES400. The solution accomplished many of their goals, but it was not as intuitive as they would have liked. “The new iOS version that we are now running on iPad minis™ has been extremely well-received,” said Miller. “The software is much more intuitive and has many new features, and the hardware is stable.”
The company adopted PENTA Mobile Field Service so that its technicians would have more complete information to better serve customers. Technicians can now see previous service history by piece of equipment, so they know more going into the call.
Waldinger also wanted to eliminate duplication of efforts. Miller explained, “Technicians used to write down a description of work, inventory usage, labor, meter readings, and purchases only to have someone in the office rekey all of that information into PENTA. Now, PENTA Mobile captures the information, we review it in the office, and then it’s automatically entered” into the PENTA system used in the home office.
In addition, Waldinger sought to facilitate equipment service history reporting. “Since this mobile solution allows us to easily track and report service history by piece of equipment, we can communicate more effectively with facility directors. This has been an effective way to sell our services to larger chain accounts,” said Miller.
The original Windows mobile version of the software was frustrating for some technicians, but the new iOS version is quite the opposite, Miller pointed out. “All of our technicians have embraced PENTA Mobile Field Service… and you’d have a hard time prying it out of their hands!”
Miller said Waldinger is just scratching the surface of the benefits that can be realized from mobile technologies. “We will certainly be looking to expand our use over the coming years to improve efficiencies and to provide more benefits to our customers,” he noted.
Miller added that PENTA Mobile Field Service was simple to implement. “We selected a pilot group for testing, which allowed us to determine best practices for the solution before rolling it out to the rest of our company,” he said. He suggested other companies planning to implement mobile applications “start small, develop your list of best practices, and then move to your larger rollout.”
For more information, visit www.penta.com.
