Despite the boom in mobile phone technology over the past few years, payphones are still big business. NWP Spectrum Limited operates 10,000 payphones throughout the U.K. and business is burgeoning. During the last two years the company has realised its maximum revenue to date. "Payphones still provide an important and much needed public service, explains John Wilson, Engineering Service Manager at NWP. "NWP's strategy is to provide phones in high-usage places such as airports, hospitals and hotels." The demand for Internet access is also creating a requirement for a new breed of public Internet terminals, which is a major growth area for NWP. The new terminals offer full pay-as-you-go Internet access, email and text messaging.
Providing Control
The efficient running of a telephone network of this size requires the coordination of an army of cleaners and more than 40 engineers. NWP is committed to keeping all phones up to scratch mechanically and atheistically and dealing with any problems that arise within 24 hours.
A control centre is run from the company's head office in Hemel Hempstead, and it is to here that any problems with payphones are reported, repair work is scheduled and the warehouse containing spare stock is managed. At the heart of this busy operation lies DISTRiX software from Dataday, handling NWP's entire logistics and distribution function. A newly implemented customer services program has now been integrated into DISTRiX replacing disparate data collection methods with a single interface and eradicating the need for multiple data entry.
Virtually all of NWP's staff now use DISTRiX in the course of their daily work, be it to process works, manage stock flow in the warehouse or despatch engineers to payphone sites. Critically, information entered while carrying out any one of these tasks is shared instantly across the rest of the business.
Minimizing downtime & maximizing profits
A phone that is not constantly in full working order has an immediate impact on NWP's profits. To ensure the instant reporting of any faults, NWP's phones are configured to be 'intelligent' so that certain technical failures prompt an automatic trigger, which dials into a central computer in Hemel Hempstead, logs the problem and immediately notifies an operator. This intelligence is extended to the emptying of the phone boxes, which are programmed to register when they are almost full. Non-mechanical faults, for instance damage caused to the physical infrastructure of the telephone portals, are reported by phone to NWP's call centre. In all three cases, an operator can quickly call up a telephone's service history, log any new problems into the system and allocate an appropriate technician.
Managing the Warehouse
The spare parts that are needed to maintain the telephone network of this size give rise to a busy warehouse operation. To avoid the delay of any repair, all NWP's engineers are issued with a complete set of spares and once an engineer reports having used a part for a repair DISTRiX automatically allocates a replacement from the warehouse. Surplus stock ties up revenue; by using DISTRiX warehouse managers can predict how little stock they need to store without it negating the efficacy of the repair service. DISTRiX also manages product returns, recording that they have been checked for quality and put back into the system account modules and thereby eliminating the need for manual data entry.
DISTRiX enables supervisors and managers to call up real time and historical data and compile detailed reports on a whole host of issues relating to their business, highlighting, for instance, which areas are generating the most profits, indicating any trends in reoccurring problems and monitoring speed of times from the reporting of a problem to rectifying it. This data also enables NWP to plan probable maintenance based on the degree of utilisation; which can therefore save money and help their equipment to last longer.
Ontime all the time
"DISTRiX is key to our whole service and sales operation, it always contains the latest information enabling us to run reports and to always know what is where," comments Steve Ellis, Chief Technical Officer at NWP. "Dataday's client service ethos is excellent; they are always ready to offer a solution, often over and above their contractual commitment to us - and unusually perhaps for a software supplier, they always deliver on time!"
