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Enormous time savings |
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Higher efficiency thanks to centralization |
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24/7 access to valuable historical data |
About Alectris
Alectris is a global service and software provider for the integrated care of renewable energy assets.
Present in the mature solar markets in Europe, the USA, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, Alectris, with its comprehensive suite of services & products, reduces the risk and delivers maximum financial returns for solar investors & plant owners regardless of site location.
The company uses ACTIS ERP, its own proprietary renewable asset management and monitoring platform built on Dynamics 365 that helps it achieve its assets’ optimum performance, reducing internal and external costs, streamlining operations, and consolidating technical, operational, and financial data and reporting into a single place. Alectris selected Resco Mobile CRM as its mobility provider and acted as an implementation partner.
Business Challenge
Alectris’ field engineers and technicians work remotely and are often out in the field. Their activities are typically in the area of preventative and corrective maintenance. The company’s aim was to provide field workers with a single solution to manage their work, including maintenance and other recurring activities, and report to the back office.
Before implementing Resco, communication, reporting, and other information transmission was mainly done via phone calls and emails, which can be very time-consuming and inefficient. However, extensive reporting is required, so field workers must reserve a lot of time for desk work, making them unavailable for essential and urgent activities in the field.
Another consideration is that the company has a global presence, and reliable and fast information exchange can be complicated. Synchronization times are long, and it can take time for the information to reach the customer.
Solution
Before choosing Resco, Alectris conducted extensive market research. It soon found out that Resco is the most flexible solution with extensive customization possibilities and quick synchronization. The company started using Resco because it wanted to save time and streamline its reporting process.
It implemented Resco as the primary tool for coordination and reporting between field workers and the back office, assigning daily work orders for each field worker. When assigning them, the back office considers the worker’s priorities, driving distances, and skillsets. Field workers then use the Resco app to report activities in the field and attach pictures to their reports. Upon synchronization with the server, the report is generated immediately and sent to the customer without delay.
On top of that, the back office also has real-time oversight of each field worker’s exact location and current activity. Thanks to that, they can dispatch the correct person in case a potential issue arises during the day.
Alectris also created a customized expense reporting system that allows field engineers to take a picture of the receipt or invoice and add it to their expenses. That allows for information to be readily available for the back office and reduces the time it takes to generate monthly expense reports to a few minutes.
The solution is highly customizable and can be seamlessly integrated with Dynamics 365. That is a considerable advantage for Alectris, as they mostly use custom entities in Dynamics 365. The company did a lot of customizations and added a few additional functionalities that are not present in Resco’s core product.
Benefits
Enormous time savings
Over the previous 12 months, the company’s team has completed more than 6600 work orders globally. Before, each work order, including information collection and archiving, synchronization, and reporting to the customer, would take approximately 15 minutes. Thanks to Resco, completing a work order currently takes around 5 minutes. The time savings from last year add up to 66,000 minutes, which is 1.5 months!
Higher efficiency thanks to centralization
Alectris’ activities are geographically distributed in different countries and regions within each country, so information exchange and reporting are a huge challenge. Resco has enabled the company to standardize its operations and collaboration between field personnel and the back office and become much more efficient.
24/7 access to valuable historical data
It often happens that a technician needs to look up historical information or past activities. Especially with older data, this can take up a lot of time. Resco allows Alectris to look up and track historical information with ease and accuracy, and even draw valuable statistics from it. This wouldn’t be possible without Resco’s mobile solution.
Optimization of global operations
Thanks to Resco, Alectris can collect useful analytical data. The company uses it for the statistical evaluation of its costs and efficiencies. For example, accurately measuring the time spent on each activity, the driving time, and other valuable data helps them make informed management decisions to optimize the company’s global operations.
Reporting from our field engineers was never that easy. Now with Resco, the process is more efficient and less time-consuming. We can assess the information sent back to the office much faster, which leads to faster decision-making. We all know that time reaction plays a key role in our business. Reporting to end customers has also been improved, as we can easily pass them all information from the field, saving us an enormous amount of time and helps us build a bond of trust with them.Anastasios Agathaggelou, Senior O&M Manager, Alectris