There is a balance, you can't have a system or technology managing customers and engineers 100%, because stating the obvious, customers and engineers are all individuals and need egos massaging and an individual approach to get the best from them, that's where management comes in. If you fail to select the right calibration of service manager, develop them and lead them from the top by someone who actually knows how to manage, then you are at best not going to grow the business, at worse you are on the spiral to oblivion

Now with technology assistance they don't need people doing them pen pushing jobs engineers are becoming self efficient.

I love it, you're dead right we'll all be in the warm brown stuff, probably up to our necks in it !

I take it this Caspar system will also be used as a surveillance tool on salesmen??? I do remember when briggs took barloworld over someone on this forum pretending to be a briggs engineer said "smell the coffee" not sure it's coffee but it's brown and warm.

I've heard something very similar to this. It's just possible that Briggs want to move this CASPA thing on to the next level which would be 'live working' which means the system will self govern eliminating the need for FSMs and reducing back office staff like they did in the parts dept a while back.

At this very moment they are working on various apps on the smart 'phone which will verify each trip mileage and further verification of vehicle usage. They will probably be able to ditch TMC and other such drains on it's resources.

Vehicle and fuel expenditure are high on the agenda at the moment.
Briggs have spent a small fortune doling out smart phones which, at the moment, looks pointless. Wait and see, they won't spend a buck unless they can save two bucks. Get the picture?

That wouldn't surprise me a bit ! Don't hear from mine from one month to the next. On one occasion didn't have any communication apart from the odd email for 11 weeks, now with this CASPA crap haven't had a call for 4 days from the back office.
Next they'll be getting rid of the controller's.

Latest Rumour is Scotland will be fading out FSM's unsure how true or timeframe of it is.

It seems like just another product of a briggs management focus group or think tank, with predictably facile results. Caspa not actually being wanted by the vast majority, the back office fill their day with unwanted, unwelcome calls to engineers that just sap morale and actually reduce efficiency. In the short term it does, in the managements eyes anyway, reassure them that they are rooting out the odd bad apple without actually looking someone in the face and having a discussion. Just get back to service management knowing their engineers, knowing their customers, communicating and...errrrr "managing", or is that too much to expect

Agreed, Just remember every company has its doers and those who take credit for everything whether they do it or not.

Most customers don't give a **** about receiving an email as to when an engineer might turn up but, yes you're right, most don't even know this CASPA thing exists exists !

The faithful customer base that I serve know me well enough to know that if I feel that time has run on a bit since their initial call I will 'phone them personally, they know that things go wrong in this job and is vitually impossible to give them a precise, down to the minute time.

Problems generally occur when the back office start pestering the engineer and think they are being smart by leaving voice messages but not telling you the fault or the customer (they think all engineers are shirkers who want to pick and choose their jobs)

My experience is that one or two shirkers do exist, but the managers should work out who they are and deal with them.......some have got away with it for years leaving the willing workers to carry the can.

Am I correct with this?

So true wiggy ! Now we have something called Caspa, a system that apparently our customers wanted so that they can log onto to, and find out where and when an engineer is going to be on site. I've asked several customers about it and what a shock ! None of them have heard of it and commented " that they won't be using it " they want to speak to a person and have a name to fall back on.
It's just another I'll conceived system that I think was found on the back of a shelve in Poundland, by some idiot who thinks that they can run the world from a smartphone.

Never been in Briggs employ, but you'd be amazed how many managers, even company directors I've worked for over the years 'find time' to watch the trackers.

Service manager - "why's it taken you 2hrs to go 5 miles'?"
Me - "I'm in central London, I've set off from Oxford street and arrived in West Acton, have you ever worked in cental London?"
Service manager "Well... No"
Me - "naff off"

Service manager -"why have you been parked on the M25 for 3 hours?"
Me - "check the traffic reports and stop being a tool"

Now it's "your pda' s been off line for 4hrs". "Well I'm servicing 6 trucks on an apple farm in the ar@e end of nowhere, you know where the customer is, you sent me here".

Stuff like this beats you down eventually, the jobs stressful enough at times without your superiors pestering you with petty nonsense all the time.

Your bosses always find time to watch the trackers... Always...

Lol and you actually believe that?? I once had a field service manager drive over 70 miles to see if I was on site because they couldn't see me on tracker (the service controller was looking at the wrong screen) when we went to pda the pda and tracker had to tally sync times etc. You end up chasing the pda rather than doing the job that's why I. Out of the industry now. Ex BHL by the way

Call me a paddy all you want, you're as much a paddy as me then with northern Ireland being part of the UK. I've worked for barloworld and Briggs, and the company that barloworld bought to get into northern Ireland for 15 years. Fully versed on how the trackers are used, who uses them and what they are used for. I spend as much time in the republic as I do in the north and am in a better position than you to comment on how the business runs here. So instead of speculating and guessing you'd be better having your facts correct before calling me dozey

Everything in Briggs always seems to be done to make things easier for the office staff ,but never to assist the engineer. Surely the more hands on tools the more money we generate ? It's not rocket science ! I personally think the true problem with Briggs is that it's an engineering services company run by office clerks with little experience of customer service and no understanding of engineering.

Nothing. Just a pity sales are not on them. Only service gets checked up on

A bit disingenuous really, i've been on a tracker system and used a tracker system, and as far as logging every little detail that goes on, do you think that any manager worth his salt has the time to **** about watching engineers all day?

I used it to log start time for clocking on, and end time for logging off for payroll, and the admin teams used them for locating the nearest engineer to a breakdown.

The thing with trackers is that they record everyday, so if there are issues of people tossing it off, you can track back and check, but honest days pay for a honest days work, is there anythign wrong with that?

I was thinking it lol. How could anyone be that gullable to think that a tracking system would only be used to find the closest engineer ? I can assure you they've been used for a lot more than that.

love it

The vans have trackers and they don't use tablets. They use tough books on the mainland, but pda's (mobile phones) in Ireland north and south. The trackers not used to monitor your every movement, more to figure out who's closest to breakdowns