Vimto Out of Home selects Portech for workforce management

Warrington’s Vimto Out of Home (OoH), the 40-year veteran drinks industry supplier has consolidated its distribution, scheduling, billing and stock management with Portech Systems’ Field Service Executive (FSE) workflow management system.

Following Vimto OoH’s acquisition of frozen drinks supplier The Noisy Drinks Co. in 2015 the company had been operating a combination of paper-based job management and a previous version of FSE developed for the frozen drinks market. Now, Portech’s new FSE serves all of Vimto OoH’s mobile field staff and provides a unified view of stock, work and assets across all parts of the business.

The new FSE system provides a centrally managed data collection point that communicates with Vimto OoH’s range of mobile computing devices and eliminates the need for drivers to make multiple return visits to a depot each day. The system also integrates with Vimto OoH’s Sage invoicing system and legacy IT systems, reducing the time taken to generate invoices and improving data quality.

Additional benefits for Vimto OoH include:

• Ability to handle between 850-900 jobs per week
• Accurate records of stock, assets and maintenance history
• Diarising scheduled maintenance calls and ensuring that they are made
• Improved visibility over mobile workforce
• Maximised active time for field engineers
• Better information available to field based team

Graeme Hodges, Internal Operations Manager commented: “Portech is a great team. The support is perfect for our needs, very flexible and responsive. With remote access to servers and data, the Portech team can dial in very quickly and securely to help us service our customers.

“They really understand our business model and requirements. This knowledge has been built up over several years, and we trust them to deliver new features and functionality to improve our business processes with the bespoke system they have developed for us.”

The system has been rolled out onto Vimto OoH’s existing mobile and rugged handhelds. Portech advised Vimto OoH on hardware selection for temporary drivers and the FSE system also runs on the ruggedised ToughTab tablets procured for those drivers.

Shaz Naeem, Managing Director, Portech Systems, added: “We had been working with The Noisy Drinks Co. for over ten years and when the Vimto OoH team saw the effectiveness of FSE they recognised that it was the right workflow and stock management solution to help them grow the business further.

“Vimto OoH is just one of the companies that is benefitting from Portech’s expertise in transforming paper-based stock and work management systems with mobile technology that streamlines job management and eliminates the need to shut down operations for stock-taking.”