About Orangebox
Orangebox are part of the Steelcase Inc. group of companies and are a UK-based designer and manufacturer of furniture for the changing workplace. With continuous research and innovation, the company is focused on smartworking 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 either the head office and manufacturing site in Nantgarw, smartworking sites in Huddersfield and London in the UK, New York and Grand Rapids in the US, or out of Dubai in the UAE. All delivering products designed expressly for the collaborative workplace. Connecting people, not furniture.
Business Challenge
Orangebox have 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 – giving 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 time 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 provided the integration with Dynamics 365 combined with location tracking capabilities that Orangebox was looking for. And on top of that, it 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
Complete information in a clear-cut interface
Orangebox most praised the possibility to display scheduled jobs and all related information on the map view.
It is really handy to see all these details in one simple interface – including scheduled times of jobs, durations to the users’ actual time of arrival/departure, and more, Tim Loring confirmed.
Accurate analysis & planning with Time Shift
Time Shift is the Resco Routes feature that allows Orangebox to see the past movement of engineers and how much time they’ve spent on each job. Having this information readily available contributes to improving schedule analysis efficiency. And allows for more accurate planning of future assignments as well.
£100 saved on hardware per vehicle
With no need to install extra location tracking equipment into trucks and vans, Orangebox are now also saving at least £100 per install/maintenance/removal of additional hardware on each of their vehicles.