PDAs help to keep your beer cool this summer

There's a lot of high-tech effort that goes into keeping lager cold and beer smelling good in your local pub.

PDA-toting engineers from servicing company Innserve make 400,000 maintenance calls each year to make sure that drinkers can quench their thirst when they want.

The company, formed in 2004 from the in-house technical services departments of Carlsberg and Scottish & Newcastle, services and installs drinks equipment in 100,000 pubs, bars, hotels, restaurants and stadiums around the country.

Its engineers spend their time repairing and servicing beer taps, pressure systems through to cellar cooling equipment.

Each technician carries a GPRS-enabled PDA which allows them to view their schedules, report the status of a job, order parts and access more of the servicing history of a particular pub.

Innserve systems development manager Stuart McHenery explained: "We have 300 technicians on the road - we need to know where they are and be able to tell them what to do."

The engineers were involved with the choice of handheld, he said: "We gave the guys a selection of ten and we had a beauty parade - we tried to get them involved and pick something they were comfortable with."

At the back-end is a service management system put together and hosted by Aspective.

Calls from pubs with problems - such as leaking taps or too warm beer - come into the Carlsberg or Scottish & Newcastle call centres which the pubs usually use to order their beer. Agents in the call centres input the service call into Innserve's systems, up to 3,000 calls a day.

"It's our customers that are logging the work for us in their call centre using our system," said McHenery.

Overnight batch scheduling of these calls gives engineers around half of their jobs, with the rest added to the list on their PDA throughout the day. For urgent jobs the engineers are also sent an SMS to their mobile phones.

Contractors can also connect to the system via broadband to get information on the jobs assigned to them.

While both parent companies were big SAP users, Innserve was keen to find a system which met its own needs.

"Although it was painful it was the right thing to do because we are a very different beast to what we were, and doing different things in different ways for different people, so making the break was the right because we would not be so advanced in our business evolution if we had stuck with the old methodologies," McHenery said.