Gas Safety/Servicing Inspections have to be carried out on all properties that are rented every year. It is compulsory to have an Annual gas safety certificate otherwise the landlord could be liable to procession. Traditionally these inspections have been carried out by registered corgi engineers using paper forms. This approach is fine if the engineer is carrying out one or 2 inspections a week. Often local authorities of housing associations employ a contractor to carry out this work. The engineers are carrying out 5-10 inspections a day filling in a paper form in the process. The engineers schedule is also given to him on paper.

igroup have developed a solution that can handle the scheduling to the engineer along with the collecting the all the information on a PDA. Using a PDA to carry out the inspection allows the data to be viewed in a Web portal. All the gas safety certificates can be retrieved easily from the management system. If your client is a local authority we can even give them access to the archived forms to meet their compliance.  

The main benefits of our system are:-

• Scheduling of Gas Inspections can be updated remotely.
• All completed forms kept electronically and accessible instantly.
• Client access to completed data.
• Easy auditing of collected data.
• PDA ensures that correct procedures are carried out.

 Please contact our solutions team on 0845 838 2184 if you would like a demo or more information.

Last Friday some of the staff from the Wrexham office helped paint garden furniture at Nightingale House, the local hospice.

We were most impressed with the building and the commitment of the staff.

A big thank you to Val who showed us around and supplied us with tea and biscuits.

Xplore technologies have released an upgraded version of their popular ix104c3 Rugged tablet PC. The new tablet has been called the ix104c3 PLUS and incorporates a 1.4Ghz processor to increase the performance of the tablet. The new processor increases the tablets ability to handle applications that would normally be reserved for office  desktops. The ruggedness of the tablet pc is as ever impressive and it still maintains the ATEX certification for hazardous environments for environments such as the oil and gas industries.

Please pick your software company carefully - They can and do go out of business. i.e. App forge folded and left many customers compromised.

Recently Integral Mobile Data Limited was Liquidated, this highlights the risk in the market.

UK Company number 04480349

A name change was made from Integral mobile data ltd to i Cwmbran Realisations ltd, just before the company went into liquidation.

Please be prudent....

PDA technology has come of age and the associated benefits that were once the preserve of large corporate business are finally filtering down to the small business sector. One of the areas that a lot of small businesses are looking to transform is how they schedule their mobile workforce whether they are engineers or couriers and secondly capture their customer's signatures as proof of work complete or the delivery of goods or services. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to utilise Microsoft Outlook to schedule the field workers, if they are kitted out with PDAs running Windows software their appointments can be coordinated centrally and the cost of the PDA is equivalent to a mobile phone contract. The advantages of this are the field workers don't have to visit the office to pick their work schedule for the day as they will have it on their PDA which means you could potentially schedule more appointments in per day, reduce the cost of travelling due to uneccessary trips to the office and redcued carbon-footprint. The next win is to utilise a piece of software like iSignature which allows you to capture job details as well as the customer's signature, this can then be turned into a pdf and e-mailed straight back to HQ and the customer as soon as the job is complete. This has a big effect on a small business for a couple of reasons firstly you have auditable evidence of when the work was completed and who signed for it which will help to reduce bad debt and secondly you can invoice your customers more quickly which helps with cash-flow which is so imporatnt from a business perspective. These small changes for a minimal outlay can have a dramatic effect to help streamline a small businesses working practice and help improve cash-flow and commuincation.