Bristow & Sutor Uses eLogii to Cut Planning Time + Boost Efficiency

CUSTOMER OVERVIEW

Bristow & Sutor is an enforcement agency specialising in local authority debt recovery. Their directly employed local authority enforcement agents work extensively throughout England and Wales to collect three main types of debt for local authorities: Council Tax, Non-Domestic Rates and Penalty Charge Notices, such as parking fines.

 

 

As one of the UK’s leading debt resolution agencies, Bristow & Sutor has over 200 enforcement agents working extensively throughout England and Wales, collecting a range of different debt types for local authorities.

Route planning is critical to Bristow & Sutor’s operations as it ensures deployment of its enforcement agents to cases in the most efficient way, driving collection performance.

To support its increasing caseload and future growth ambitions, Bristow & Sutor embarked on an extensive IT investment program, including a new case management system and a new route planning solution. After an extensive RFP process eLogii was selected as Bristow & Sutor’s new route planning solution.

The challenge

Bristow & Sutor visit approximately 200,000 cases per year and as a result of the scale of their growing operations, a solution was needed to satisfy a number of key areas:

• The solution needed to scale to improve performance

• Manual overrides to complement automatic planning of visits

• Improved filtering to take into account the wide variety of debt types and allow for the team to check a route (and make changes if they wished to change the sequence)

• Handling exceptions and operational nuances that occur during planning or as a result of daily execution

“We were looking for a solution that was able to take into account the scale we operate at, handle the multitude of different variables present in our operations and integrate into our platform. Our planning team needed a better, quicker and more scalable way of doing things” – Susan Ring, COO

Bristow & Sutor needed a solution that was configurable enough to take into account all of the operational variables of their business (including debt types, requirement for certain agents to only visit certain locations, re-visits and re-planning)

“During the process we looked at 20+ solutions and eLogii scored the highest on most attributes we looked at. The system is very intuitive, mature, and able to handle very high volume. Specifically on handling volume: it is not uncommon, for example, for our routing and planning team to be working on 40,000 visits/calls in eLogii at any one time. eLogii handles this with ease”. – Paul Lillico, CTO

The solution

Bristow & Sutor implemented eLogii in the business during early 2023 and within weeks were live with Route Optimization and Planning as well as live tracking from their field operations.

With eLogii, Bristow & Sutor were able to:

• Plan faster and more accurately
• Limit route suggestions to a sub-set of drivers based on defined zones as well as filters
  
  
  
  
• React quickly to unplanned events / make quick changes
   
  
  
• Update routes as the day develops and add last-minute cases
  
  
  
  
• Track field agents in real-time
• Allow field agents to flexibly start work from different locations on different days
  
  
  
  
• Visually differentiate different case types / visits amongst 40-50,000 cases displayed on screen at any time
  
  

Training and implementation across the business was swiftly executed with a train-the-trainer approach and a period of hyper care to ensure that the business embraced the new solution and was able to set up to secure maximum results.

One of the major differentiators between eLogii and other solutions on the market is the ability to handle huge scale. In Bristow & Sutor’s case this means 40-50,000 tasks being ‘worked on’ on a single screen at any time. There are multiple concurrent users across the business planning different areas / interacting in different ways with the system.

“The support you receive from a SaaS vendor is often equally  important as the solution itself. Implementation with eLogii was easy, quick and seamless. We worked closely with the team to ensure that an implementation, UAT and roll-out plan was defined. They supported us every step of the way, providing a level of support along the way that surpassed our expectation (and experience with other vendors). What stood out in particular was the ability for the implementation team to listen to our requirements and provide creative help and advice as to how we could best reach our goals using eLogii” – Paul Lillico, CTO

The Results

Faster and more accurate planning

Planning time was reduced by 35%+ and error rate was substantially reduced.

Lightening quick and intuitive user experience

Working with tens of thousands of calls on the screen at any one time is now seamless with no latency or lag

Ability to quickly make last minute changes

Changes can be made on the fly to routes and this is reflected immediately across all relevant systems as a result of API integration. This has been instrumental in lifting team efficiency

Seamless integration into case management system and other business systems

Data flows quickly and easily into eLogii from Bristow & Sutor’s case management system when cases are ready for routing. Once cases have been routed, the data flows seamlessly back to the case management system to ensure that everything remains synchronized at all times

Easier and more efficient execution out in the field and more collections per day

Collections per agent are up as a result of more efficient routing (with more efficiency to come when full route optimization is used by the business) and always ensuring that the right agent goes to visit the right case.

“We have been extremely impressed with the results from eLogii so far - the solution is powerful and the team have found it extremely intuitive and easy to get going with. We signed a multi-year agreement with eLogii and are looking forward to deepening our relationship with them over the next years.” - Anthony O'Keeffe, CEO