About Action for Children
For more than 140 years, Action for Children has been helping disadvantaged children and young adults through a number of innovative services and initiatives. In total, the charity works with around 300,000 children, young people and carers to tackle serious issues like child neglect and abuse.
The charity is run out of six core offices that co-ordinate and support approximately 600 services, offering support and care across the UK. These services include adoption and fostering, family support, helping children with disabilities and specialist schools. The ability to access and update information securely online is essential in the provision of these services.
The challenge
As part of the DEA project, Action for Children equipped 2,000 of their mobile staff with new devices which contained data SIMs to enable connectivity whilst working with children and families.
Reports were coming in that mobile workers were losing confidence in their devices due to loss of communications or intermittent “slowness”.
The Trustees wanted evidence that the investment that had been made was delivering the promised return on investment. The challenge was that once the devices were rolled out, there was a complete lack of visibility into who was using the devices, how much they were being used and where the troubles spots were located.
Alan Crawford, CIO at Action for Children, explained: ”We thought we had provided our mobile workers with the right tools to enable them to do a great job. What we did not know was that there were devices not being used at all, those that were had connectivity issues which included slow speeds or no connection at all!"
The solution
"Six months ago we were introduced to Tracline who provided the ability to gain full visibility into device activity and location, enabling us to fully manage our mobile estate and know that we achieved the project’s objectives, realise our return on investment and measure our KPI’s" said Alan Crawford.
As part of the solution, Action for Children shared their cost and department codes so that reporting could be generated at a local and team level. These reports provide Board, Management and technical information showing usage, issues and location.
They can now make management decisions on their mobile estate, including who needs additional training and coaching on device usage.
The results
By implementing the Tracline solution, Action for Children has seen significant take up on the device usage, saving workers and volunteers’ time and improving their experience using the devices.
Action for Children now has visibility into their whole mobile estate, as well as usage of their devices and evidence of the level of return on investment they are achieving at a geographic and team level.They are also seeing the productivity improvements they originally envisaged with mobile working and the mobile workers are much more confident in using their devices.
With improved network connectivity, it has freed up its staff and volunteers so that they can focus on their primary roles – helping to care for and support children and young adults and their families.
