VisiTour, the scheduling and tour planning software of FLS, the Kiel-based software hotbed, is now available in an advanced version with new functions – as the optimal solution for telecommunications and public utilities providers. Our first highly satisfied customer is the Cologne telecommunications company NetCologne.
In VisiTour, the company has developed a product, which at present can be regarded as unrivaled. This software has been equipped with new functionalities, in order to accommodate the special characteristics of the telecommunications and public utilities sector at the highest level. Special attention was paid to the area of order dependencies, allowing optimal scheduling of simultaneous orders at different locations (e.g. line checks at main switching centers), previous orders (e.g. previous visits of technical facilities) and follow-up orders.
The technicians at NetCologne handle initial installations, fault clearance and maintenance jobs in companies, for private customers, and in their own technical facilities. The most important requirement to be met by the software is the recording and the communication of all interdependencies between partial orders. For a project to run smoothly and efficiently, the different work steps have to be completed in the right order and by the right people – VisiTour ensures this.
Special emphasis was also put on continuous communication.
The system for order acceptance is still the trouble ticket system “Clarify” which already existed at NetCologne. New orders are recorded in Clarify and automatically forwarded to VisiTour. The software then calculates an optimal plan for the work procedure and sends the result in real-time to the technicians via UMTS. The technicians work on the respective orders and, after completion, send all their feedback, including service reports and further documents, back to the central systems via VisiTour Mobile.
For our customer NetCologne, VisiTour was adapted and implemented on time and on budget within a period of only 8 weeks. The mobile software component VisiTour Mobile was one of the additions especially developed for NetCologne and integrated into VisiTour.
As Telekom’s largest competitor in its region, NetCologne wants to improve its market position even further by using VisiTour. Already today, the German consumer association “Stiftung Warentest” has attested to the extraordinarily high customer satisfaction rating of Cologne telecommunications. While nearly one in three customers of other service providers is rather unsatisfied or even very unsatisfied with their telecommunications service, 90 % of NetCologne users are happy with their service. The formula for success is very simple: faster and more efficient scheduling of technicians, more prompt fault clearance, better image – leading to more customers.
Thomas Brechtel, managing director of FLS, is particularly pleased about the implementation of VisiTour in the telecommunications sector: “When telecommunication fails in a company, everything is put on hold. Our aim was to offer a real solution that enables telecommunication providers to improve their performance noticeably.” And it was a spectacular success: “VisiTour provides a cost reduction of up to 20 %”, assures Brechtel with confidence and again emphasizes the economic benefit: “The investment in VisiTour already pays off in three to six months.”
