REACH is a global technology company based in Youngstown, Ohio. They created a modern vehicle maintenance and repair exchange which is a marketplace for companies with fleets to connect with service providers to arrange maintenance and service appointments. This exchange helps trucking companies reduce service downtime and service providers maximize their technician productivity. REACH also helps integrate service enablers like equipment owners, original equipment manufacturers and call centers in a cohesive maintenance ecosystem. The REACH platform includes mobile and web apps that connect operations teams to field technicians to support work order management of preventative, scheduled, and on-demand repairs.
REACH believes in automation, efficient utilization of resources and time, and streamlined communications across the maintenance ecosystem. Automation helps their member companies eliminate redundancies and achieve milestones more quickly while delighting their customers. Efficient utilization of service technicians’ time is paramount to ensuring the partners on the REACH exchange are able to extract the necessary value out of their platform.
The REACH platform streamlines communications between groups in the field and operations teams at various offices. Given the amount of coordination necessary to service customers in so many geographies, REACH built a proprietary application, REACH+, to help drivers, call centers and trucking companies communicate effectively and efficiently with each other. The app is built with the above guiding philosophies in mind, replete with alerts and notifications to leverage realtime data.
"After implementation, it became clear that location data does more than provide cosmetic features, REACH is able to provide deep value to their users."
Amol Jain
Co-founder
In order to meet these technology needs, the REACH platform must often integrate legacy systems, which became particularly difficult when attempting to design solutions for visibility of real time location. The urgent need for accurate tracking visibility was most prominent in the on-demand use case where commercial truck drivers were waiting for roadside assistance from auto service technicians on the way. When commercial truck drivers are met with unexpected delays due to vehicle maintenance, it is important to minimize all waiting time as any time spent not driving is costly and has a negative impact on the entire day’s delivery schedules.
In keeping with their philosophy of continuous improvement and seeking efficiency, REACH wanted to create visibility for all parties involved. Drivers, truck operators, tire stores, and other stakeholders all need to be on the same page as the work order is being completed; and operations and finance teams need to track distance traveled for verification and audit purposes after the work order is completed. These requirements drove the REACH technical team to find a partner that could quickly provide logistics capabilities within their tech stack. By engaging HyperTrack, technology leadership at REACH were able to build logistics functionality with the guidance of an experienced solutioning team.
Driver SDK to accurately track the location of the service technician as they travel to customer appointments
By having the ability to document travel in real time, operation steams are able to capture the location of the service provider and share this with customers. By giving customers key information about who is arriving to service vehicles, REACH provides all parties with the visibility to provide accurate ETAs so that all downstream partners have the information about new arrival times in order to make decisions about shifting timeframes.
Orders API to plan trips for service technicians arriving to maintenance appointments
By using HyperTrack’s OrdersAPI, the team was able to quickly build functionality to send notifications to customers when a technician is enroute. The team wanted to provide technicians with the best routes and have the ability to track adherence to the route in realtime.
Dashboard visualizations to display work happening in real time
Since the operations teams have the location data from site visits, HyperTrack allows streams of this data to be presented on dashboards. By receiving this data through webhook streams, REACH is able to see service providers in realtime within their own systems and gain a pulse on what is happening in the field. These views allow operations teams to have live data from the field without depending on technicians to manually provide status updates.
After this implementation, the team will explore Logistics Map. HyperTrack has developed maps built for the specific requirements of on-demand field service use cases, giving field technician teams detailed insights on the most efficient place to park and complete services based on the service being provided. By developing these maps, members on theREACH marketplace will be able to use data from every completed service to improve subsequent service appointments.
REACH was able to implement the above in a matter of weeks and noticed immediate results. Management initially considered the Uber-like display of live location as a compelling feature that would aid in customer acquisition for both sides of the exchange. After the implementation, it became clear that location data does more than provide cosmetic features, REACH is able to provide deep value to their users.
By capturing granular location data teams can now manage technician utilization, automate the deployment of technicians, and give the entire group of stakeholders detailed data at the per service level that can be consumed in realtime and in retrospect. This rich location data improves customer relationships in the field and helps operations teams make better decisions.
