Sage Mobile Service

Introduction

Last year at Sage Summit we showed proof of concept demos of a number of mobile applications we were developing. At this year’s Sage Summit we announced that these were now shipping. In this blog posting, I’m going to talk about one of these new mobile applications, namely Sage Mobile Service. This application dispatches technicians to perform work for customers and enables them to get directions, customer information and to collect payments.

Common users of this service would be plumbers or electricians. Where calls come into a dispatch center and they need to be scheduled to visit various sites. There they perform work and can collect payments. Hopefully any companies that perform work of this nature will find this App helpful.

This application consists of three parts: a web application to manage customers and dispatch work orders, an iPhone application for technicians to receive information and take payments and then a connection to your on premise ERP system to share transactions and data.

The Dispatch Web Site

The Dispatch Web Site is a standard web application that runs in any modern browser. From this website you can manage your customers and create work orders for your technicians to perform. Below is the welcome/dashboard home page for this website.

You can get lists of the current work orders along with lists of your customers and drill down into the detailed information of anything listed.

When a call comes in from a customer, perhaps for a plumbing problem, you can enter in all the information and then schedule a technician to perform the work.

As soon as the work order is saved with an assigned technician and scheduled time, it will be available on his iPhone so he can go do the work.

The iPhone App

The technician receives these service call requests from their iPhone via an App. This App lets them know where they should be and when. The App will present a schedule of the work they need to perform today, tomorrow and in the future. This gives the technician an idea of all the work they have to do today and how long they have been scheduled to perform that work. Below is a screen shot of a work order on an iPhone, you can scroll down for more information or tap to drill down for more detailed information.

They can also get additional information on the customer, like their location, directions and contact people. They can also bring up a history of service calls for that customer so they know ahead of time what work has been performed previously.

From the App they can also add work items and parts. So if they need to add their billable hours or add any chargeable parts then they can do this.

When the work is completed, the technician can either receive payment via swiping a credit card through a device attached to their iPhone or they can mark it on account. Of course all sales taxes will be calculated automatically as part of this process. If it’s on account then an invoice will be sent later. Next week I’ll talk about the Sage Billing and Payments web application which can be used to collect these invoices if they aren’t paid on time.

Connected to ERP

Where do the customers come from? Where do the payments made go? The answer is your on premise ERP system. A small connector is installed onto your on premise ERP system which is configured to communicate with your Sage cloud account. This connector will upload information from your ERP like your list of customers to the cloud and will download transactions as they are completed to the ERP. Initially we have connectors for Sage 100 ERP and Sage 300 ERP. We will have connectors for Sage 50 ERP (US and Canada) following shortly.

In the case of Sage Mobile Service all the customer information along with information required to fill out A/R Invoices is uploaded to the cloud and then A/R Invoices are downloaded and inserted into the ERP as transactions are processed in the cloud or on the mobile devices. The connectors for Sage 100 ERP and Sage 300 ERP run continuously as a Windows service and need to be installed on a server that is generally running. The Sage 50 ERP connectors are part of the product and need to be run manually every now and again.

All the requests are queued, so if one system or another is down, things will catch up again once it is available. The connectors only call up to the cloud, the cloud never calls down to the ERP. This means you don’t need to operate a web server and you don’t need to reconfigure your firewall. Installation is very easy and transparent.

International

Initially we have been rolling this out in North America. We will be rolling this out internationally, but first we have to provide the sales tax calculation engine (currently we use Avalara) and we need to provide integration to local credit card processors. Depending on the region, it might make sense to roll out the service, perhaps without credit card support, but this will be on a case by case basis. Fortunately most regions have simpler VAT type sales taxes rather than the crazy US system.

Summary

The world of mobile applications is opening up all sorts of new opportunities to expand ERP systems from beyond hidden backroom offices out into the real world. No one wants to have to enter data twice, so these applications are great mechanisms to get transactions entered directly into the ERP from the point of work and not relying on paper records that are later typed in (perhaps inaccurately). Sage Service Billing is one of our first wave of these applications with more to follow.