Energy metering company Providor has transformed its business with the latest mobile technology to become one of the UK’s primary smart metering companies.
With the roll-out of a mobile resource management system from Leeds-based BigChange, Providor has replaced a number of systems and eliminated paperwork with the fully digital real-time works and management solution.
Providor, part of the Sureserve Group, has been working in the field of gas metering since 1998 and has completed well over a million successful installations across the country. With 250 mobile engineers the company installs, maintains and repairs metering systems in domestic and commercial properties for UK energy suppliers including Scottish Power, Octopus, EDF Energy, and E Gas and Electricity.
In moving into smart metering Providor needed to prepare for increased data capture and digital reporting to meet the stringent performance requirements of the energy majors. Realising that their existing systems were not up to the job to meet their ambitious business expansion plans, the company reviewed the top solutions on offer.
“BigChange stood out from the rest with particularly good job scheduling and an excellent mobile app with digital job cards that would clearly do everything we needed well into the future,” said Luke Harris, Information Systems Manager, Providor.
The cloud-based solution provides a single platform CRM, Job Scheduling, Mobile App, Vehicle Tracking and Online Portal and this was a key factor in their choice according to Harris. “Probably the biggest appeal was that with BigChange we could bring everything together; a single system from order to invoice as a complete end-to-end business system.”
Smart meters are electronic devices that replace traditional meters recording gas or electricity use, connected wirelessly to utility companies for more accurate monitoring.
Providor’s engineers complete over 1200 jobs a day using JobWatch, the BigChange mobile app, and there are over 100 other users of the system in customer services and operations, located at the company’s call centre in Elland and head office in Newmarket.
Running on engineers’ rugged devices, JobWatch eliminates paper reports and provides automated workflows to ensure correct procedures are followed. The electronic job cards ensure the correct data is collected and supported by photographs to provide evidence of work done. A customer portal meanwhile allows customers to access contracts and key information such as meter readings and photographs from each job.
“JobWatch is a ‘compliance dream’ as it gives auditors full visibility of jobs live and it is also fantastic for customer service. Whether a job is successfully completed or not we know exactly what’s going on and can provide instant updates backed by the facts to quickly resolve any issues,” Harris explains.
“Providor is a successful growing business and with BigChange everything is in place to allow us to expand and continually improve our own business performance. It really helps with customer interaction as well and our utility customers are always impressed with the visibility that JobWatch provides – helping them meet their own performance standards,” Harris adds.
About BigChange
Launched in 2013 and based in Leeds, UK, BigChange provides a range of mobile workforce management technologies that are trusted by 50,000 mobile workers and back-office personnel at 1,500 organisations around the world. BigChange employs 170 people and signed over £20m worth of new contracts in 2020.
BigChange’s pioneering all-in-one mobile workforce and job management solution, JobWatch, provides organisations of any size with a paperless means of planning, managing, scheduling, and tracking their mobile workforce operations. Combining CRM, job scheduling, vehicle tracking, a mobile workforce app, and an on-demand booking app, the system can manage in-house and sub-contracted operations simultaneously.
In 2020 BigChange was awarded a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, one of the highest honours for UK companies, and its workplace was recognised by Best Companies with a two-star rating. The company featured in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 in 2018, 2019 and 2020. BigChange was named in the 2018 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and won the Technology & Innovation prize at The Logistics Awards in both 2017 and 2018.
For more information visit www.bigchange.com.
