Until six months ago, Pam Green and her administrative colleagues at the London company Technical Services had a particular problem: the need to hold electronic and easily accessible case histories on all Technical Services‘ customers and equipment and, in tandem, to persuade them to begin asset-tagging: building an electronic record of all their equipment – with model, serial number, location and history – which would be invaluable both for Technical Services‘ administration and for engineers in the field.

Technical Services designs and installs bespoke ventilation, refrigeration and air conditioning systems, principally in restaurant and leisure facilities in the London area. It also maintains existing systems, with ten technicians in the field.

“We needed something far more efficient than having to look through archive paperwork, the diary and a spreadsheet in order to check on the equipment held by customers,” says Pam Green, the company’s service administrator. “We were after a system that we in the office could log into and our technicians on site could log into, and immediately call up the required details.”

It should also be possible for engineers to update the data immediately from each site visit, on their PDAs.

“Some of our clients hold a variety of equipment, not necessarily installed by us and sometimes spread over large sites. In many cases, they may not even know what they have or where it’s located, and the position might not be immediately obvious to a visiting technician. Historically, a lot of that information may be in our senior management’s heads but as we’ve grown, we’ve needed a way to store the knowledge for everyone to use.

“We knew that being able to call up the exact model number and location of a piece of equipment, in the office and on technicians’ PDAS at the client’s site, would improve our service and save a lot of time.”

Pam and her Technical Services colleagues searched online for the solution. “We found RedZebra and immediately the bullet points on their site struck a chord, because of the similarities with what we wanted to do and although we also saw another provider, it seemed clear we should go with RedZebra.

“We’ve been in the business 30 years and we always go the extra mile. We wanted a system that could do the same. What they offered met our needs and was nice and simple to use, not too involved.”

Technical Services started using RedZebra just before Christmas 2013.

“We’re not yet using it to its full potential and I think we use it in a different way to other RedZebra users, so it’s a work in progress, but the guys from RedZebra are very good and go through everything. And when we ask if the system can do certain things for us, we may be stretching things a bit but they always try to look for ways. They’ve never said ‘no we can’t’.”