The Customer
Our customer is a major provider of facility maintenance services, including electrical and mobile engineering services to more than 1,600 customers across 60,000 locations. They serve a wide range of industries from commercial properties such as large office buildings, to distributed university campuses and national retail chains.
Some features of their operations include:
- Relying on staff to schedule and manage up to 6000 work orders every day.
- Ensuring the right field staff were assigned to each job.
- Meeting the needs of demanding customers who expect a quick turn around and real-time updates on the status of work orders.
Their Requirements
The customer needed an Amazon Web Services (AWS) based cloud solution that would improve workflow while addressing a range of technical issues and requirements. The solution needed to:
- Replace or integrate nine legacy IT applications.
- Meet availability requirements of 99.95% and be constantly monitored as it was critical to the customer’s core business.
- Be extremely secure (ISO 27001 compliant) as they were dealing with sensitive information such as building plans.
- Ensure the right engineer, gets to the right job, with the right tools on time.
- Improve profitability by increasing number of jobs completed and reducing the miles travelled by workers.
Our Solution
Using our patented, templated process, we were able to recommend and implement a subscription package of the FuseForward Cloud Suite that met all of their requirements and even improved the system where needed without undertaking a complex project.
Their pre-existing system had no integration of applications or visibility into their data, and no ability to handle streaming data. We used our patented processes and the FuseForward Cloud Suite of technologies to integrate a complex range of applications and data sources, including streaming data.
The customer’s subscription to the FuseForward Cloud Suite means that we are the single point of contact for any changes on their platform. They don’t need to manage multiple vendors.
Key ways the FuseForward Cloud Suite is used for this project:
FuseControl
Using FuseControl, FuseForward is able to monitor the AWS environment, including any potential fail points. We monitor system usage, system performance, utilization and traffic, and this performance is regularly reported on. Areas that need attention are shared with application managers, which helps ensure they meet key metrics and prevents the system from going down.
FuseSecure
Using FuseSecure we were able to meet the customer’s strict security requirements. Above the customer’s initial request, we were able to:
- Deliver a direct connection to the AWS environment, ensuring all information used by the system never touches the public internet.
- Enable multi-factor authentication to ensure external customers to access the system securely (e.g. when they check on the status of their jobs).
- Provide a single sign-on for all nine applications, increasing security by improving user password management.
- Comprehensively address the customer’s shared responsibility on AWS.
We continue to monitor and operate this environment for our customer.
The Outcome
FuseForward provides the backbone for their system and AWS operations. Since the system has gone live it has successfully achieved their goals of delivering the right engineer to the right job at the right time.
From a technical standpoint, the environment we delivered:
- Has an availability of 99.95%.
- Can handle 800+ application users, up to ten thousand customers, 1200 mobile users.
- Received the highest possible security rating during penetration tests by a leading cybersecurity firm.
- Processes 1000s of transactions per minute.
- Includes five + secure integrations with third-party applications.
- Incorporates five + major suppliers managed by FuseForward.