Aboutime was founded by Keith New and Jeremy Squire, both veterans in the delivery of workforce management solutions and experienced working with a range of technologies from the established vendors in this field.

Organisations with large fieldforces of engineers, inspectors and delivery personnel have long understood the advantages of workforce management and scheduling systems. In practice they have achieved benefits but they have also been disappointed to find:

It is harder than expected to deploy the automation and gain the improvement planned
Implementation projects are long, eg 6 months+, and require custom development
The solution is business critical but cost is too high for a fully resilient systems architecture
High upfront costs for licence, infrastructure and project require significant investment
System suppliers measure their success on new licence sales therefore this is their priority
Version upgrades, eg every 2 years, require an unexpectedly large and expensive project

There had to be a better way, and there is . . .

Aboutime directors recognised the opportunity for a next generation workforce management solution which overcame these challenges and began extensive research. TOA Technologies had just won several substantial and high profile customers in the UK and Europe and other potential customers were saying great things about TOA's offering, ETAdirect. Following evaluation the reasons became clear and Aboutime worked to establish an exclusive agreement to represent TOA Technologies in the UK. As part of this agreement TOA also became an investor and equity holder in Aboutime.

Aboutime utilise this technology with a consulting approach that establishes a strong 'trusted partner' relationship and enables each customer to maximise their potential for performance improvement.

About TOA

TOA ETAdirect is the only enterprise class mobile workforce management system that is web based and provided using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, otherwise known as on-demand or pay-as-you-go. With it's quicker and lower cost start-up, customers achieve ROI in months, not years.

TOA is a relative newcomer to the workforce management systems market, founded in 2004, but already challenging for global leadership with customers ranging 70 to 7,000 field workers choosing TOA over long established vendors. The number of active users has doubled every year and in 2009 more than 250 million transactions were managed by TOA ETAdirect.

The exciting differences TOA bring to the market have also been recognised by analysts such as Gartner who awarded TOA 'visionary status' in the annual magic quadrant report for Field Service Management 2007/8/9 and winner "Innovative CRM Software Vendor of the Year".

For more about TOA Technologies visit toatech.com