Richmond, B.C., Sept. 8, 2003 — MDSI Mobile Data Solutions Inc., a provider of mobile workforce management solutions to the utility, telecommunications and broadband industries, announced that three of its customers have recently been acknowledged with awards for customer service and operational excellence.
Memphis Light, Gas and Water received the prestigious FFAst Track award for Mobile Service – Large Enterprise from Field Force Automation, while Yorkshire Water and Belgacom were both winner and finalist respectively in Gartner’s European CRM Summit 2003 award.
The annual FFAst Track Awards recognize the year’s best mobile deployments. Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) received the award in the Large Enterprise category for “replacing their completely paper-based dispatching and work-order system with wireless notebook PCs and state-of-the-art enterprise software to dispatch and route service techs”.
Since installing MDSI’s Advantex solution in late 2000, MLGW has realized a significant return on their investment. They cite results including a 99% job completion rate on the first visit, 98% order completion rate on the day it is scheduled, and an overall technician productivity increase of 10%.
Missed appointments are down to almost zero, and technicians have made up enough time to add one or two more jobs per day.
According to Jon Laman, CIS development project leader, “We are extremely pleased to win this award. Our Advantex system has benefited us in many ways, the most important being our ability to provide our customers with outstanding customer service. At the same time, the company has saved almost $2 million each year since Advantex was implemented.”
Yorkshire Water, the 9th largest water utility in the world, won Gartner Group’s 2003 CRM Excellence Award in Europe, Middle East and Africa. There were three finalists for this award but judges stated that, “All finalists displayed a mature approach to CRM and had a strategy that put the customer experience at the center of the initiative. Yorkshire Water stood out because it explicitly started with the customer experience, set clear measurable goals and ultimately demonstrated very impressive results on key metrics. As a result, the company has turned the customer experience around 180 degrees from customer satisfaction hitting rock bottom after the drought in the United Kingdom during the mid 90s.”
With their Advantex mobile workforce management system, Yorkshire Water meets 98 percent of their customer appointments and 85 percent of their emergency jobs within a two-hour time band. The company has also seen call volumes diminish, fewer repeat customer calls, and more calls being successfully closed the first time.
Belgacom, Belgium’s leading telecommunications operator with over 5 million customers, was also one of the finalists in Gartner’s 2003 CRM Excellence Award. Belgacom has been using MDSI’s Advantex system since 2000, and in December of 2001, won an award for “Best Example of eInnovation in a Large Enterprise” at the European eWeek 2001 Awards.
Today, Belgacom has 2500 technicians using the system and has realized significant returns on their investment. They meet a much higher number of customer appointments, have enhanced billing accuracy through improved data quality, and respond more quickly to customer site sales leads. Belgacom’s dispatchers are free to deal with customer service issues rather than manually dispatching technicians to different sites, and technicians are spending less time driving and working on administrative tasks and timesheets.
“We are extremely happy to see customers on both sides of the Atlantic winning awards for improved customer service and operational efficiencies resulting from their Advantex implementations,” said Erik Dysthe, CEO and Chairman. ” This is one of the best paybacks any supplier could hope for and it validates the importance of the software and services we provide”.
About Memphis Light, Gas and Water
Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) was founded in 1939 and supplies more than 400,000 people in Memphis and Shelby County area with electricity, natural gas, and water. The largest three-service municipal utility system in the U.S., MLGW is publicly owned and is composed of more than 2,600 employees working to achieve the company’s vision of being the “company of choice” for utility services in the competitive 21st century. More importantly, MLGW is concerned with providing personalized utility service with some of the lowest rates in the nation. This year, MLGW is celebrating its 60th anniversary as the public power company for the people of Memphis.
About Yorkshire Water Services
Serving approximately 4.5 million residential customers and 130,000 business customers, Yorkshire Water Services provides clean water services, waste water services and waste management services to the Yorkshire region, England. The company employs approximately 3,000 people and operates 112 water treatment works producing 1.3 billion litres of water daily and 620 sewage treatment works that treat nearly 1 billion litres of domestic sewage, industrial effluent, and run off from roads and roofs. The network of water mains and sewers that Yorkshire Water maintains comprises enough pipework to circle the earth.
About Belgacom SA
Belgacom SA, headquartered in Brussels, the heart of Europe, is the leading supplier of global telecommunications solutions in Belgium. The Belgacom group mainly offers local, intercity and international voice and data services, cellular telephone services, satellite services, carrier services and all Internet-related services.
Its Internet Service Provider subsidiary Infosources, (listed on the Nouveau Marche – Paris, represented by Skynet in Belgium and by Infonie in France), of which Belgacom holds 74.3%, is Belgium’s leading supplier of Internet access services. Its mobile subsidiary Belgacom Mobile (75% Belgacom, 25% Vodafone) had 3,662,000 customers as of March 2001, representing more than 55% market share. Belgacom is actively involved in the security market through Belgacom Alert Services Holding.
Since 1996, Belgacom has been offering Belgacom World Solutions, which cover more than 220 countries and territories and through which customers can connect their various business centers based on a single telecom standard.
About MDSI
MDSI is a provider of mobile workforce management software in the world. MDSI’s software improves customer service and relationships and reduces operating costs by allowing companies to manage field resources more effectively. Headquartered in Richmond, BC, Canada, MDSI was founded in 1993 and has approximately 350 employees.
The company has operations and support offices in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. MDSI services approximately 100 customers and has licensed more than 80,000 field service users around the world. MDSI is a public company traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (MMD) and on NASDAQ (MDSI). www.mdsi-advantex.com.
