Orangebox boosts field operations planning & scheduling with Resco Inspections+

About Orangebox

Orangebox is part of the Steelcase Inc. group of companies and is a UK-based designer and manufacturer of furniture for the changing workplace. With continuous research and innovation, the company is focused on smart-working solutions— creating furniture that fosters collaboration while providing contemporary aesthetics, visual/acoustic privacy, and commercial-grade performance.

Orangebox currently has over 450 employees who work at its head office and manufacturing site in Nantgarw, smart-working sites in Huddersfield and London in the UK, New York and Grand Rapids in the US, and Dubai in the UAE. All deliver products designed expressly for the collaborative workplace— connecting people, not furniture.

Business Challenge

Orangebox has recently deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service to their 30 UK-based installation and service engineers.

We wanted to replace the incumbent vehicle tracking with a mobile device tracking solution that would pair our users’ schedules and job specifics from Dynamics 365 with their actual movement.

Tim Loring, System Improvements Project Manager at Orangebox, described the challenge.

To deliver an improved customer experience, they were looking for a solution that would be tightly coupled with their core Dynamics 365 planning tool. This would give them a platform to automate notifications to both customers and internal teams.

With our engineers working to specified dates and times of site visits, it is increasingly important to keep both customers and our back-office staff informed of estimated times of arrivals and work progress. Particularly if unforeseen events unfold, such as traffic delays,

Tim added.

Furthermore, Orangebox also hoped to eliminate additional location tracking hardware required for track trucks and vans.

Solution

Resco Routes (a part of Inspections+) provided the integration with Dynamics 365 combined with location tracking capabilities that Orangebox was looking for. It also enabled them to reduce vehicle tracking hardware costs by having a mobile device tracking system alternative running on engineers’ phones.

The features enabling to track and interrogate live positions of devices as well as view historic points in time, ensure there is a great audit trail of activity available to us. And having it all in a dedicated dashboard directly within Dynamics 365 makes reviewing our operations even simpler.

Resco Routes is also seamless to the end user and can be installed at virtually any mobile device, providing great flexibility and control to system administrators. We have only been using it for a few months, but we’ve been seeing its added value right from the start,

noted Tim Loring, Orangebox’s System Improvements Project Manager.

Benefits