Kirona Solutions

A Message from Lord Pickles and Lord Blunkett, followed by Kirona Solutions's best practice article

The ability to listen and learn from one another has always been vital in parliament, in business and in most aspects of daily life. But at this particular moment in time, as national and global events continue to reiterate, it is uncommonly crucial that we forge new channels of communication and reinforce existing ones. The following article from Kirona Solutions is an attempt to do just that. We would welcome your thoughts on this or any other Parliamentary Review article.

Rt Hon The Lord David Blunkett

Rt Hon The Lord Eric Pickles

www.kirona.com

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

32 | KIRONA

David Murray, CEO

Kirona’s technology enables field-

based workers to increase productivity

and improve service quality

Enabling organisations to do more with less, Cheshire-based

Kirona is a market leader in field service management

solutions and has been for 15 years. Its software enables

public and private sector organisations to increase productivity,

make cost savings and improve service quality. Kirona’s

CEO and co-founder David Murray explains the elements he

considers to be key to Kirona’s success and the solutions they

provide for any and all industry challenges.

Kirona is the leading field service management solutions provider for organisations

both nationally and internationally. Having recently celebrated our 15th anniversary,

Kirona earned an impressive £11 million turnover and ranked 12th in Megabyte’s

Emerging Stars and 4th in the top externally funded technology companies.

Kirona is the “go-to” provider for dynamic resource scheduling, planning and

mobile applications for social housing organisations. During the last few years,

however, Kirona has been successful in gaining customers from non-housing

organisations such as local authorities, central government departments, utilities,

construction, facilities management, retail, health and social care.

We are proud to have won contracts with organisations as diverse as DEFRA,

Balfour Beatty and the NHS. That being said, however, we still actively target and

value our core social housing market. Organisations in non-housing sectors benefit

from Kirona’s field service software as it enables them to achieve their objectives

such as increasing efficiencies and productivity and improving service deliverability.

Essentially, any organisation looking to do more with less can benefit from

Kirona’ssoftware.

FACTS ABOUT

KIRONA

»CEO: David Murray

»Established in 2003

»Head office in Alderley Edge,

Cheshire

»Services: Market leader in field

service management solutions

»No. of employees: 80+

»G-Cloud Crown Commercial

Service: Digital Marketplace

Suppliers

»ISO 20000-1: Information

Technology Service

Management

»ISO 9001: Quality

Management

»ISO 27001: Information

Security Management

»Kirona’s software is used by

over 40,000 people each day

»www.kirona.com

Kirona

33KIRONA |

BEST PRACTICE REPRESENTATIVE 2018

»THE OUTCOMES

»£2 million savings per

year

»Improved visibility and

accountability of home

repairs and social care

teams

»20 per cent increase in

the productivity of the

council’s homes team

»No-access rates

reduced from 40 per

cent to just 3 per cent

»Turnaround timescales

for repair work now

counted in hours and

not days

»Administrative tasks

have also been

significantly reduced

As well as our strong growth in new

markets, what I’m especially proud

of is having a team of talented

and committed individuals who

embody Kirona’s ethos of continual

improvement. Nearly a quarter of the

Kirona team have been with us for

over ten years, which is something I’m

particularly proud of.

We continually invest to drive our

solutions to meet the diverse needs of

our growing customer base. We have

an active membership organisation,

the Kirona User Group, made up of

customers who help drive the product

road map. Listening to our customers

has been key to making Kirona the

success it is today.

Kirona’s Solutions

Kirona provides three distinct

applications that can be used on

a standalone or combined basis,

including Dynamic Resource

Scheduler (DRS), Job Manager and

InfoSuite, providing scheduling,

process management and analytics

capabilitiesrespectively.

Kirona’s DRS Scheduler is the leading

dynamic scheduler for field service

management. It seamlessly blends

appointed, planned and responsive

work across the field-based workforce.

Kirona’s DRS software helps clients

increase productivity, ensure that all

customer commitments are met, keep

travel time to a minimum and ensure

more tasks are completed in a singleday.

An additional beneficial module of DRS

is the “Cyclical Servicing” functionality,

which enables organisations who

implement regular, cyclical jobs such as

gas servicing, gutter cleaning, etc., to

automate the planning and scheduling

of these jobs.

Kirona’s Job Manager mobile application

connects centralised teams with its

field-based workforce in real time

to enable organisations to increase

productivity, improve customer service

and reduce costs.

Kirona’s InfoSuite business information

software provides your organisation with

real-time actionable insight into what

is important to you. Kirona InfoSuite

provides you with a holistic view of your

operation, visibility of key performance

indicators and the ability to quickly drill

down to the underlyingdetail.

How North Lanarkshire council

saved £2 million per year

Kirona’s field workforce management

solution has improved the way North

Lanarkshire council delivers its services

across two departments: social housing

repairs and social care.

The challenge

The main challenge within the social

housing sector centred on the availability

of its housing repair representatives

to carry out vital repair work. In some

cases, residents could wait up to three

days for an appointment to be met

and crucial work completed.

Kirona’s field service

management technology

enabled £2million

cost savings for North

Lanarkshire Council

THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW

Highlighting best practice

34 | KIRONA

The council’s social housing repair

teams also spent a lot of time

commuting between jobs and a

central hub in Motherwell. Robert

Forman, former service manager

for Business Process Change and

Improvement at North Lanarkshire

council, said: “Typically, housing repair

representatives would get up in the

morning, come into a central hub,

pick up their job list and then go out

to work. After they’d completed their

jobs for that day, they would then

travel back to Motherwell to log their

activity.” The council identified a need

to simplify this by reducing the number

of visits repair teams would need to

make to their focal hub.

In the home care sector the council’s

main challenge was frontline care,

with the local authority being limited

in the time its home support workers

could spend with service-users because

of increased administrative duties

between home visits.

North Lanarkshire council currently

carries out 2.5 million home visits a

year, meaning around 7,500 home

visits are made every day. With such a

heavy workload, home support workers

are often distracted by phone calls

while making home visits, preventing

them from providing important

customer care. The local authority

faced the significant task of having to

update its diary and job management

systems to better provide customer

care and reduce the time needed by

the home support workers to arrange

home visits. Alongside this, the council

faced the problem of improving

workforce management within the

social housing sector by increasing the

visibility and accountability of their

housing repair representatives.

Our solution

North Lanarkshire council invested

in Kirona’s mobile working and

dynamic job scheduling technology.

Des Murray, head of housing

property at North Lanarkshire

council, said: “Kirona’s workforce

management software was chosen

as it demonstrated a wide range of

capabilities supported by a proven

track record with customers. It

manages everything from the

scheduling of jobs in the office with

the DRS software, through to the

fulfilment of the work by housing

repair representatives using the Job

Manager mobile application.”

By using Kirona’s Job Manager, home

repair representatives are able to get

up in the morning and are allocated a

job that is never more than 15 minutes

away. Now that their work is logged

electronically, there’s no need to keep

travelling back and forth. They are now

geographically profiled, so the council

is better able to manage their time

effectively and provide a more efficient

service for residents.

After successfully applying Kirona’s

software within social housing, it

was rolled out to the home support

workers. North Lanarkshire council has

reduced the number of administrative

tasks that were preventing home

support workers from providing vital

social care for citizens. The next steps

are to roll it out to other departments

in 2018.

Now their

work is logged

electronically,

there’s no

need to keep

travelling back

and forth

“

The technology provided

real-time visibility of

field based workers,

increasing productivity

by 20 per cent

www.kirona.com

This article was sponsored by Kirona Solutions. The Parliamentary Review is wholly funded by the representatives who write for it. The publication in which this article originally appeared contained the following foreword from The Rt Hon Theresa May MP.

The Rt Hon Theresa May MP's Foreword For The Parliamentary Review

By The Rt Hon Theresa May MP

This foreword from the then Prime Minister appeared in the 2018/19 Parliamentary Review.

British politics provides ample material for analysis in the pages of The Parliamentary Review. For Her Majesty’s Government, our task in the year ahead is clear: to achieve the best Brexit deal for Britain and to carry on our work to build a more prosperous and united country – one that truly works for everyone.

The right Brexit deal will not be sufficient on its own to secure a more prosperous future for Britain. We also need to ensure that our economy is ready for what tomorrow will bring. Our Modern Industrial Strategy is our plan to do that. It means Government stepping up to secure the foundations of our productivity: providing an education system that delivers the skills our economy needs, improving school standards and transforming technical education; delivering infrastructure for growth; ensuring people have the homes they need in the places they want to live. It is all about taking action for the long-term that will pay dividends in the future.

But it also goes beyond that. Government, the private sector and academia working together as strategic partners achieve far more than we could separately. That is why we have set an ambitious goal of lifting UK public and private research and development investment to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027. It is why we are developing four Grand Challenges, the big drivers of social and economic change in the world today: harnessing artificial intelligence and the data revolution; leading in changes to the future of mobility; meeting the challenges of our ageing society; and driving ahead the revolution in clean growth. By focusing our efforts on making the most of these areas of enormous potential, we can develop new exports, grow new industries and create more good jobs in every part of our country.

Years of hard work and sacrifice from the British people have got our deficit down by over three quarters. We are building on this success by taking a balanced approach to public spending. We are continuing to deal with our debts, so that our economy can remain strong and we can protect people’s jobs, and at the same time we are investing in vital public services, like our NHS. We have set out plans to increase NHS funding annually by an average by 3.4 percent in real terms: that is £394 million a week more. In return, the NHS will produce a ten-year plan, led by doctors and nurses, to eliminate waste and improve patient care.

I believe that Britain can look to the future with confidence. We are leaving the EU and setting a new course for prosperity as a global trading nation. We have a Modern Industrial Strategy that is strengthening the foundations of our economy and helping us to seize the opportunities of the future. We are investing in the public services we all rely on and helping them to grow and improve. Building on our country’s great strengths – our world-class universities and researchers, our excellent services sector, our cutting edge manufacturers, our vibrant creative industries, our dedicated public servants – we can look towards a new decade that is ripe with possibility. The government I lead is doing all it can to make that brighter future a reality for everyone in our country.

British politics provides ample material for analysis in the pages of The Parliamentary Review

The Rt Hon Theresa May MP
Prime Minister