Mexican Senate saves time and money with Mobile Service Management app

Mexico City, Mexico – November 20, 2014

The Mexican Senate has just deployed a Mobile Service Management (MSM) application for its Inventory Service on budget and on time, that was developed with Genero Mobile.

“This new process saves us 3-4 days for many repairs and saves taxpayers money too, said Omar Garcìa Galeana, General Manager IT Systems & Telecommunications, The Mexican Senate

The purpose of MSM is to empower service agents with the collection and real-time recording of service requests via smartphones. This shortens lead times for the establishment of the daily service ‘inventory’. Future versions will enable Senators to make requests via tablets.

Before MSM, the service inventory was created in ‘batch mode’. The department would collect repair information manually during its daily rounds and would note them down on a piece of paper or by digital camera. A work order would be registered in the information system by the supervisor later on. The supervisor would then print the list of work orders and assign the appropriate worker to fix a given request. Service incidents range from basic infrastructure issues including plumbing, heating, electrical, cable, masonry, through to requests to repair or replace furniture, etc. Quality was an issue since there was no record of how well the repair was executed.

With MSM, work orders are now created in real-time by the agent using the smartphone’s camera and then sync’d to the main information system where they can be dispatched automatically via SMS  – eliminating any latency. Once the repair is done, the agent sends a photo of the completed job for quality assurance purposes. Job are automatically timed.

The application took a little over 2 months to complete for one developer, including the specification, design, development and testing phases. The specification called for Android 4 and iOS 7 support for 50 service agents that need to authenticate first through the Senate’s security system (written in Genero). The number of users, will grow to 200 agents working on other geographically dispersed sites.

These service requests are closely accounted for by the Senate as part of the building’s ‘acceptance process’ with the architects.