ELECTRICAL SAFETY AUTHORITY

Background

The Electrical Safety Authority (ESA) is one of the largest organizations responsible for electrical safety inspections in Ontario, Canada. Any time a consumer or a contractor makes a change to their electrical services, an ESA field technician needs to verify that the job was done safely and in accordance with the Ontario Electrical Safety Code.

Challenge

ESA has always been forward-thinking when it came to mobile technology. They implemented a Windows-based mobile inspection program MEPS back in 1995, when other companies did not even have mobile automation on their information technology radar. Then in 2000, ESA migrated to SAP’s CRM mobile solution that was challenging right from the start: from difficulty to customize the solution and attain full functionality, to concerns regarding data integrity and ability to support the solution. ESA experienced very long data transfer rates, sluggish performance on inspector’s laptop and an inability to make changes to accommodate evolving business needs.

Mark Taylor, Director of IT at ESA, was tasked with finding a replacement solution. ESA issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to 10 vendors who would be measured against such decision criteria as:

• The ability to interface with SAP
• Short start-up/sync times
• Implementation costs
• Ongoing maintenance costs
• Ability to own the entire solution upon project completion
• Ability to customize the application

Solution

The final two candidates that met the RFP selection criteria were SAP’s new mobile technology and FieldWorker Enterprise. The two companies were requested to develop a proof-of-concept (POC) solution in four weeks to help ESA measure the viability of each proposal.

“FieldWorker was able to deliver on the key POC criteria and their performance, compared to our benchmarks, gave us confidence that the solution would meet our project goals,” said Mark Taylor when describing the POC results.

While providing a robust enterprise resource planning environment, SAP architecture lacks certain flexibility. This meant that SAP customers were cautious with incorporating external mobile solutions in a “best-of-breed” approach. However, when FieldWorker and Illumiti accepted the challenge and delivered a working solution within 120 calendar days, complete with the addition of enhanced FieldWorker Platform functionality, ESA was rewarded with a mobile solution that meets all their project goals.

Benefits

The successful deployment in the most demanding system environments makes using FieldWorker within other enterprise solutions, like Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, a viable lower cost alternative for mobile automation.

“FieldWorker Enterprise continues to get rave reviews from the 250 ESA inspectors who rely on our technology every day.”

– Pete Neve , President of FieldWorker

In 2006, ESA was honored as a program finalist in the prestigious annual Computerworld Honors Program.

“ESA has been a big supporter of FieldWorker and we are extremely happy that both of our companies are getting recognition for this solution,” said Peter Neve, President of FieldWorker. “FieldWorker Enterprise continues to get rave reviews from the 250 ESA inspectors who rely on our technology every day.”