City Building (Glasgow), one of Scotland’s largest construction companies, with a turnover in excess of £200m, has chosen 1st Touch mobile software to control, manage and support the activities of its responsive repairs and gas operatives working for over 40 of the company’s housing clients.

Having originally tried another mobile application, City Building was very aware of both the benefits and challenges of successfully implementing an effective mobile solution. However, with the significant potential rewards of choosing the right system going forwards, City Building decided to identify a mobile application that more closely integrated with their bespoke Civica system.

This captures and manages all repair activity across the company’s client base. Any such PDA based solution would also need to integrate seamlessly with their appointment scheduling system from OptiTime.

After an in-depth tender process City Building chose 1st Touch mobile software which not only met their integration requirements fully but also enabled them to take the development of tailored client solutions in-house.

1st Touch applications can bring significant efficiencies and productivity increases to any application where field based operatives provide services and the company has already won widespread acclaim in the social and local authority housing market.

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The resilient but flexible system enables programming-free, user-customisable PDA based solutions to be created through its easy to use graphical interface and is specifically designed to

simplify handheld form design and data capture.

Any type of electronic form can be generated without the need for Business Process Mapping. The system also smartly links the operatives’ PDA to existing back office solutions.

In support of this, 1st Touch has also developed high quality integrations with most of the leading housing management systems used by local authority housing organisations, RSLs, Charities and ALMOs. This includes the Civica system in place at City Building.

Angela Murphy, City Building’s Head of IT, said: "We undertook a great deal of groundwork to identify the right system to meet our needs. Flexibility and integration with our existing applications are important to us, so 1st Touch scored well there. However, we also needed a solution that would allow us to take development in house.

"This is an expanding part of our business as it allows us to change the system to accommodate the specific needs of clients. Thus with 1st Touch in place, we are able to respond even more rapidly to our customers and therein able to provide even better customer service. In fact we can now give clients real time updates and as the clients themselves have access to the application, they can see the job status themselves at a glance. When you look at the processes now in place, the amount of paperwork and admin are significantly reduced and that is good news for all concerned."

Robert Dent, Chief Executive of 1st Touch was quick to recognise the high levels of professionalism and customer service excellence at City Building, commenting: "City Building has built a reputation, throughout Scotland, for its commitment to excellence in all aspects of its work and its customer interface. One of the key strands of this uncompromising drive to quality is the sector leading standards they apply to customer service and the investment in 1st Touch mobile technology reflects this. We look forward to working closely with them on rolling our technology out to other business areas over time."

(GK)