Engineering company BES GmbH: Effective mobile workforce management

The Company

Founded in 1992 as a small, local, mechanical engineering company, BES GmbH has continually grown and innovated its business practices. Today, BES is an important competitor in the market for the construction of cutting-edge photovoltaic power plants and water treatment facilities. BES employs over a hundred staff, of which about half are mobile, being in charge of setting up and servicing machinery at customers’ sites.

The Challenge

Until recently, employees manually filled in time sheets and filed receipts and documentation of their missions, which were then manually processed by the management team. Not only was this practice particularly time-consuming, it was also prone to errors (poor handwriting, wrong time records, lost paperwork, etc.).

The Satellite Solution

BES GmbH implemented M3 Logbook, a workflow software developed by BERNOT Information Technology (Konstanz, Germany) based on satellite navigation. Automatically and in real time, the application creates and processes time sheets, receipts and documentation of maintenance missions carried out by the mobile workforce. These are then fed directly into the company’s central information system.

A mobile version of the satnav application is used by maintenance staff to check in upon arrival at the customer site, document the work to be carried out and the result (e.g. a time- and geo-referenced photograph of the machinery before and after repairs), and check out upon completion. The generated data is sent instantaneously to central processing and can be consulted via a web portal. BES GmbH can thus supply its customers with geo-referenced and time-stamped documentation of the maintenance work carried out. In the long run, this data is also used to improve workforce and fleet management.

BES GmbH funded the equipment of its mobile workforce with GNSS-enabled mobile phones and pay an annual licence fee for the use of the workflow software.

The Result

BES GmbH now saves a considerable amount of money every year on internal administration alone, allowing it to invest in the future. Thanks to M3 Logbook, customer invoicing is now based on transparent, tamper-proof documentation and contributes to customer satisfaction.

Key fact/figure:
Saving time and money while increasing transparency