Nokia UK has posted a case study paper to its website and a related video YouTube that explores why UKDN Waterflow, a water and wastewater infrastructure service company, has adotped Lumia as the mobile device of choice for the majority of its field engineering workforce. The key reason boils down to cost, the ease of roll out and intregation with existing backend systems, but it's interesting to note that the camera performance of the devices was also a factor.

The case study video arrives as Nokia UK continues its push into the enterprise market, considered a key target area for 2014 by Nokia's UK management team. UKDN Waterflow is the sort of medium scale enterprise that Nokia is aiming to target as it seeks to grow its share of the business to business segment past 20%.

As part of the Lumia adoption, UKDN Waterflow worked with enterprise mobility provider, TBS Enterprise Mobility, to integrate their workforce management platform, Taskmaster, more fully with Windows Phone. The aim was to provide a more cost-effective and user friendly alternative to an existing PDA based solution that would allow more communication between field and back-office workers.

The cost and durability of the devices was an important factor. For the cost of just one of the previous PDA based solution, UKDN Waterflow was able to deploy five Lumia devices. What's more field works had needed a mobile phone anyway, so the savings were even greater.

Windows Phone was a key part of the solution because of the way it integrated with existing systems:

The Windows operating system was key, because it integrates seamlessly with UKDN Waterflow’s existing Microsoft systems and field operations. Managers would therefore be able to communicate more efficiently with field engineers, for example by using Outlook and Lync.

The new solution, when combined with the hardware capabilities of the Lumia devices, resulted in immediate improvements in business practise:

The combination of the Lumia devices and TaskMaster led to immediate improvements in scheduling and on site management. Engineers are now able to send real-time progress updates through to customer service teams. Because the whole system is automated, if an engineer identifies a new job, it takes just five minutes to raise it, then two minutes to schedule it. 

Information captured on site is now integrated with back-office systems in real time, accelerating processes and minimising errors. Now, 50% of jobs requiring back-office contact are done automatically via TaskMaster on the Lumia devices – reducing time to input data from 25 minutes down to around 10-12 minutes.

Further information is available in this Nokia UK paper.