"We researched the market thoroughly to fulfill both our technical needs and our functional requirements. Infomill proved to us that the partsarena solution met both. A short pilot program involving representative front-line engineers from several countries endorsed our decision. This is a reliable, high-quality solution that will put accurate technical information where it is needed, literally in the hands of our engineers, to help ensure first time fixes."

Bo Sivenius,  IS/IT Manager, BT Europe

Company Overview

BT Europe is part of BT Industries, in turn part of Toyota Industries Corporation. BT Industries is the world’s leading supplier of warehouse trucks and related services. They employ 8,000 employees and have a turnover of approximately $1.9 billion. Production is handled at seven plants in four countries and the sales network covers the entire world. Customers are mainly large, consumer-oriented companies with very high demands on efficient material handling.

BT Europe employs 1,200 service engineers across Europe to service and maintain the equipment that it has sold.

Business Challenge

BT Europe was distributing over 60,000 pages of technical information in paper format to its service engineers. This obviously represented a significant cost in terms of printing and distribution. The end product was also unwieldy to use and impossible to carry around, weighing over a quarter of a tonne.

BT Europe needed to find a way of providing all of its technical content to its entire mobile workforce. This included service manuals and parts diagrams.

Why BT Europe Chose PartsArena

PartsArena was able to hold and display all of BT Europe's 60,000 pages of information on a handheld device. In one go, the need to print and distribute paper manuals has been removed.

Usability was a major concern for BT Europe. If a technological system was chosen to replace paper manuals, it had to be user-friendly. The simple, intuitive PartsArena system proved to meet this condition. Training a user to operate PartsArena takes minutes as the software is designed with ease of use in mind.

With PartsArena, BT Europe could get all of its technical information right where it is needed – in the field with the engineers who use it.

Completing The Jigsaw

BT Europe already had a service management system in place. This was the Easy solution from Sogeti (part of Cap Gemini). This had been rolled out to mobile service engineers running on Intermec handheld devices. Because PartsArena is designed to run on any Windows Mobile device, it was simple to install and run the software on the existing handhelds. Furthermore, PartsArena is designed to integrate seamlessly with most existing Service Management systems, so parts ordering can now be done from PartsArena via Easy.

End User Benefits

BT Europe thoroughly researched the market when looking for a way to mobilise their technical information. They could not find a better solution than PartsArena. The benefits that it will bring them as a business are:

• Reduced printing and distribution costs.

• Consistent and up-to-date information throughout their business.

• The ability for the entire mobile workforce to have access to the information they need all of the time.

• A reduction in wrongly-ordered parts – PartsArena uses Easy to order parts at the touch of the screen.

PartsArena has proven to BT Europe that masses of information can be put where it is needed – with the people who use it.