Totally agree jump lead. Headless chicken comes to mind. As for"all on board"to be on board you have to have some input and involvement ?

Technology development is expected these days in life and smart phone apps growing quickly. The main problem is not engineers, its that there is too much constant change at Briggs to see any project through. just recently went through a cost cutting exercise, big headcount reduction, and lost some really good experienced and long serving people and totally kept the wrong ones in my opinion.
I don't know the agenda but so far I cannot make sense of all the changes and how it will actually work.
My thoughts, Iceberg dead ahead!

It's one future not the future. For sure the small number of victories will be shouted about at the expense of a deafening silence of a much larger volume of failures and indifferences. SS you have missed the point that you are dealing with individuals, both customers and engineers are not machines, this is not George Orwell's "1984"

That may well be true in the past years but things are definitely changing with technology and this is only going to grow more progressively with Briggs as there way is to keep growth and improvement in the business , is to buying it and development it and you all have to be on-board that's the future now.

To be a good manager requires practice, skill and patience. To be a great leader requires humility.
All technology has the same goal, to make life better for mankind, not all men use technology for the benefit of all and so it has always been.

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?