Fast Lean Smart (FLS) customer, British Engineering Services (BES), have been crowned winners of The Forum's ‘Innovation award for Enterprise Planning’ at The Customer Strategy & Planning 2019 event. BES, who use FLS' scheduling and route planning software FLS VISITOUR also scooped the award for overall Innovation of the Year 2019.

The Forum is an an independent body supporting the contact centre industry since early 2000 and is a supplier-independent and work across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre and planning professionals.

Widely recognised as the ‘go-to place’ for support teams and business leaders, the team of independent experts offers advice, support and training, helping many organisations develop the capability of their support functions through bespoke learning and development, accreditation, qualifications and standards benchmarking.

Each year applications are submitted to the body's for industry awards in specific categories. Aftter FLS introduced BES to The Forum and the company submitted an application directly for the ‘Innovation award for Enterprise Planning’, which you can read below.

The winners were selected by a team which included 12 experienced industry practitioners, many of them previous winners or finalists. Judges visited each of the shortlisted organisations, and then assessed them against a strict set of criteria.

The BES submission: “The power of planning”

How flexible resourcing and strategic use of planning helped them stand out from competitors on service and create a new, one team culture that’s doubled sales and raised month-end service by 50%.

The catalyst for transformation at British Engineering Services was creating a new company, separate from RSA, seizing the chance to stand  out in the market and deliver on ‘making Britain a safer place’. Capacity planning was fundamental, alongside outside expertise with VISITOUR scheduler from FLS. Reliability comes from effective end-to-end planning, delivering the highest quality inspections, on time, every time – an exceptional customer experience. Engineer surveyors remain a key part of the planning process and lifestyle flexibility has been a massive win too. It’s created a customer-driven and flexible mindset and removed traditional territorial boundaries. This is a human organisation that everyone feels part of. Three years on and the evidence is clear – sales up 100%, customer retention up 15%, huge cost savings and delivering the best service in the market.

Key Results

• Customer retention up by 15%
• Cost savings c10-15%
• 50% reduction in wasted downtime in 2018
• 74% improvement for ‘on or before’ SLA for the largest clients
• 100% rise in sales performance in 2018
• The best service in the market

British Engineering Services is the UK’s biggest independent engineering inspection, testing and certification company. 450 highly qualified Engineer Surveyors perform 2.8 million inspections each year, supported by Planning Team members using online reporting systems and FLS VISITOUR scheduler.

You can download the slides here and watch a video of the case study here.