"Quotes and invoices used to take two to three weeks to reach clients due to processing data time. Now they receive an instant paper report and digital information in around 30 minutes – essential in the fire and security industry to comply with regulations."

Advanced Peripheral Systems

FileMaker Heats-Up Security Business for APS

Advance Peripheral Systems [APS] was established in 1993 with a mission to provide a comprehensive range of fire and security solutions. "We continually strive to improve our efficiency and to select the most appropriate of the available technologies," says Andy Fox, Managing Director of APS. "The key objective for APS has always been to provide exceptional customer care and this has enabled us to develop into one of the largest independent, integrated fire and security companies within the UK."

Customer satisfaction is the company's top priority and it invests in its people and management systems to ensure that it maintains the highest level of service.

The company is based in two locations. Engineers work predominantly in London, while all paperwork needs to be held at the Worcester HQ – requiring a vast quantity of documents to be transferred between offices each week.

Engineers were able to send limited job details remotely, via their PDAs, and although the system was slow and unreliable, it was quicker than a physical courier. However, to comply with health and safety standards, a very significant amount of paperwork had still to be created and left with the customer. This information then needed to be duplicated at head office – hence the requirement for couriers – adding further cost to the business and eliminating any time efficiencies brought about by the PDA system.

When Andy was appointed as APS Managing Director in 2004, the company was still struggling with an expensive "out-of-the-box" £50K service management solution. Andy believed this was contributing to massive losses: administration costs were spiraling; the system lacked efficiency; and staff perception was that the system was not helping them complete their duties.

Andy felt there needed to be a significant investment in streamlining and updating the company's IT infrastructure to tackle the issues of financial leakage and business inefficiencies.

A Secure Solution

APS chose to build a bespoke service management system using FileMaker Pro. According to Andy: "We were already using FileMaker – although certainly not to its full potential. But it had proved to be the most effective and easy to use piece of software in the company, so it made sense to look at the options for centralising more business functions onto it."

Working with IT services provider, Computech IT Services Ltd, the entire service management process was migrated onto FileMaker, creating a single data repository for storage and access to engineer bookings, customer quotes, job status, and crucially, the accurate creation, logging and management of safety certificates.

At the same time, APS was replacing its outdated PDAs with the Destiny Wireless Solution that would allow all data to be "written" on paper forms (with a laser pen) and be remotely recorded directly into a data management solution. The flexibility of FileMaker Pro showed it was ideal for the job by providing simple integration with Destiny – automatically recording and sorting all key job data into the correct search fields and "filing" a scanned copy of the original order. This new system was also able to manage all quote sheets and text reports.

A Business On Fire

Six months after fully launching the new integrated solution, APS was back in profit, and the new FileMaker Pro-based system had helped slash the company's losses by a staggering 83%. Other savings were made immediately. Overnight, over £7000 was saved as courier costs were virtually eliminated.

In terms of time and efficiency savings, APS has been able to slash the time taken to record new job details by 50 percent. According to Andy: "This means our engineers are now more productive because, by spending less time recording and sending information back to the HQ, they can take on more jobs throughout the day.

APS has also managed to reduce the time it takes to generate a work order from two weeks to one day. So, alongside more time to chase new opportunities, because the information its professionals are using is more accurate and reliable, they can be more efficient.

"Quotes or invoices used to take two or three weeks to reach clients due to processing data time. Now clients receive an instant paper report and digital information in around 30 minutes – essential in the fire and security industry to comply with regulations," adds Andy.

Equally important is the fact that APS has now cultivated an image of being well managed, efficient and technologically advanced. This has helped the firm win further contracts, including Tate Britain.

Securing Future Revenues

Looking ahead, APS sees FileMaker Pro as a long-term solution. "We are looking forward to taking advantage of the new features in future versions of FileMaker Pro, which will make us even more efficient when it comes to processing the engineer schedules. Particularly when a customer calls, we will immediately be able to see the site location the customer is referring to in the web viewer. This will assist us in our engineer deployment."

"We are also planning to resell the total solution, including the service management database, to our regular contractors, generating an additional revenue stream and strengthening our relationship with them," concludes Fox.