"Customers see a more professional side to our business. The information returns to our service management systems almost immediately after a job is complete, and we can post an invoice to the customer on the same day."

David Parsons, Financial Director, Winterhalter

Company Overview

The Baxi Group is one of Europe's leading heating and home comfort specialists and employs over 5,500 people throughout Europe with a turnover of €1.0bn (£700m).

From centres of manufacturing excellence in the UK, Italy, France, Germany and Denmark, the Baxi Group produces: energy efficient central heating boilers, hot water heating and storage units, space heaters and radiators.

Baxi is the UK's leading heating manufacturer and employs 200 mobile service engineers to install and maintain equipment in domestic, commercial and industrial premises.

Business Challenge

The current Baxi Group has emerged after several years of acquisitions and mergers. As a result of this activity, the business had disparate systems for handling their technical and service information.

Information was held in different places and in different formats, including paper manuals, pdf documents and a proprietary document management system. Finding the right information was often a painstaking process and cost the telephone helpdesk and the parts departments a lot of time.

In order to support the business, it was vital that all of the information be brought together into one format that could be used both by helpdesk and parts staff and by mobile engineers.

Why Baxi Chose PartsArena

Baxi put out an invitation to tender to provide a solution to provide consistent information across the business. The solution was to display parts diagrams, service manuals and installation instructions. In all there were to be around 28,000 pages – clearly far too much to distribute in paper form.

PartsArena proved to be the only workable solution for Baxi. It allowed them to store all of the information on their existing Pencentra tablet PCs and to have consistent information in their helpdesk and parts departments and out in the dealer network.

It also proved to be far more functional and simple to use than using pdf documents on the tablets. PartsArena allows the user to zoom in and pan around a complex diagram and then select parts via hotlinks or carry out a text search for parts.

Simple Roll-Out

Baxi already had Pencentra tablet PCs in use with its mobile engineers. Because PartsArena can be used on any Windows device, there was no need for any new hardware. Converting the data from its various formats into one source for PartsArena was a daunting task, but one that Infomill was well used to. Infomill completed the task very quickly and soon had Baxi and its dealer network operating the new system.

Because PartsArena is so intuitive to use, Infomill carried out "train the trainer" sessions which only took half a day. Before long every service engineer in Baxi had access to the latest information for every product they produce.

End User Benefits

Baxi looked at a number of alternative solutions to their problem. They could not find a better solution than PartsArena. The benefits that it brings them include:

• A consistent set of information for all products and all users.

• Saved time – and hence cash – for the helpdesk and parts departments.

• Information where it is needed – at a customer's site where the product is. This in turn dramatically increases customer satisfaction.

PartsArena has proven to Baxi that a consistent set of information can be quickly and easily provided across a business especially where it is needed most – in the engineers' hands.