TBS are specialists in mobilising legacy IT systems, creating solutions that empower employees to work more effectively in the field. TBS wanted to innovate and create new and improved mobile solutions for businesses, so they engaged with Samsung. Wearable technology was seen as something that could transform the way field workers operate day to day. The Gear watch was an interesting proposition for TBS. It provided a hands-free solution which, unlike other devices, could work independently without the need to pair it with a separate smartphone. Plus, the Tizen operating system worked smoothly and the watch wasn’t as clunky as others available at the time.
After early success with businesses using the Gear watch, TBS became a Samsung partner and the company began looking into smartphone and tablet solutions too. Working across a wide range of industries from utilities and energy to retail and transport, TBS have come up with multiple workforce solutions that perform best on Samsung devices.
In the logistics sector, TBS have been able to help businesses save money and work faster with an easy-to-use barcode scanning solution. Specialist mobile devices with integrated barcode scanners can cost upwards of £600 each, but with the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active tablet or Xcover4 smartphone, businesses can now scan barcodes at an industrial level using more affordable, durable and rugged devices.
In the facilities management sector, TBS and Samsung partnered with Vodafone and their Total Workforce Mobility (TWM) solution to provide Quicklight – a lighting maintenance service used by major wholesalers, retailers, garages and hospitals – with a way to schedule work and manage employees more effectively.
Vodafone’s TWM, powered by Samsung Galaxy A5 and TBS’s TaskMaster software platform, enables Quicklight to allocate weekly jobs to engineers and arm them with all the information they need to complete the work, such as which parts they need to fix the issue when they arrive at their client’s premises. This ensures jobs are completed more quickly, while paperwork has also been greatly reduced because engineers can enter all the job details into their Samsung smartphones on-site, removing the need to return to the office.
Steve Reynolds, CEO of TBS, was delighted with both the products and services Samsung provided: “Samsung were a breath of fresh air. Our software has become very sophisticated and we found that when other devices ran our products and were pushed to the limit, it impacted their performance and stability. This wasn’t the case with Samsung; they’ve got an eco-system of devices that are great for business, from rugged devices that are ideal for field workers to executive devices which are great for professionals. We found Samsung were always helpful and offered a reliable service.”
“Samsung were a breath of fresh air. Our software has become very sophisticated and we found that when other devices ran our products and were pushed to the limit, it impacted their performance and stability,” said Steve Reynolds, CEO OF TBS.
Internet of Things (IOT).
The next step for TBS was to leverage the full range of Samsung’s ecosystem of technology to enable businesses to work smarter and more efficiently.
Using Samsung SmartThings – a network of smart, Internet-connected devices that speak and interact with each other – means that staff can be alerted via their smartphones, tablets and smartwatches when a job needs doing. TBS worked with a leading cleaning company to install sensors in lavatories which alerted cleaners via their mobile devices and smartwatches when their services were required.
This was a vast improvement on the old way of working, which saw cleaners visit the lavatories once an hour and sign a piece of paper on the wall to prove they’d cleaned the premises. This meant that staff were often cleaning unnecessarily. With Samsung SmartThings technology and TBS’s TaskMaster Enterprise Mobility Platform, cleaners can work more efficiently and effectively, only attending a lavatory when it needs cleaning, rather than every hour.
TBS continue to deploy IoT and disruptive digital transformation solutions across a range of sectors. This includes everything from apps that manage hot desk availability, to apps that monitor environmental conditions in the workplace, improving employee well-being and productivity.
Secure devices for data protection
In May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation will be enforced. This new EU-wide data protection policy will see companies incur huge fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global annual revenue (whichever is higher) for failing to protect the data and privacy of their customers.
So it’s important that TBS are able to offer a secure software solution when they’re speaking to prospective clients. Samsung Knox offers defence-grade, best-in-class mobile security, which is approved by the UK government’s National Technical Authority for Information Assurance (CESG). It works in real time to identify cyberattacks and protects mobile devices from being hacked in to.
Companies can be sure that making their business more efficient with Samsung and TBS isn’t compromising security.
A bright future
There are lots of future developments in the pipeline to get excited about too. “Cognitive services are matching human levels of skill and competency; speech recognition in the ‘Switchboard Test’ has an error rate of just 6.3%. Bixby Voice recognition is a new user-friendly technology that will allow customers to ‘ask’ for help. This could result in a job being automatically generated and pushed out to a fieldworker by TBS’s TaskMaster software. This could be a real game-changer,” said Steve Reynolds.
