ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: For catching rats - or customers -the future is digital
'You are under pressure to deliver a better service for fear of becoming irrelevant'
Alarge pest-control company in Scandinavia is one of the best case studies around for the way enterprise software is about to change globally. Typically, the company was regularly called out when someone had a problem with rodents, and it would send out a team to investigate and lay down traps. Later, the team would return to check the traps and replace those that had been triggered. The details would be captured in the company's enterprise resource planning system (ERP), where inventory, revenue and other traditional bookkeeping-style entries were made. Again and again. Rinse and repeat. But in the past few months there has been a dramatic shift. The rodent traps have been fitted with devices that are connected to the internet, and send an alert when traps are triggered. Through a new software tool called field service management, the information is integrated with the ERP system, which co-ordinates service to the customer. Aside from the fact that it intelligently allocates trap r...
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