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For the inspectors at Ontario's Electrical Safety Authority (ESA) "timeliness" and "co-ordination" are far more than buzzwords.

They are critical pre-requisites for success at the job.  

As its name suggests, this not-for-profit corporation is responsible for enforcing electrical safety across Ontario. It is accountable to the public through the Ontario Ministry of Government and Consumer Services.

ESA carries out its mandate through a fleet of 260 field inspectors, who – day after day – inspect electrical installations relating to new construction, renovations, or maintenance in commercial, industrial and residential settings.

As each year ESA receives more than 350,000 new inspection requests that are divvied up among 260 inspectors.

Managing the logistics of such a workload is a pretty daunting task.

A lot rides on the quality of the system used to record and synchronize inspection data.  In fact, the productivity of inspectors and seamless coordination between teams depend on this.

After a couple of disappointing experiences (first with a home-grown Windows-based mobile inspection system, in 1995, and subsequently with SAP's field service software in 2000) ESA finally hit the jackpot.

In 2005, it finally identified a system that's just what the doctor (or the inspector?) ordered.

In the three years since its roll out at ESA, the system has increased inspector productivity, slashed synchronization times by as much as 90 per cent, and drastically reduced administrative labour and costs.

It has also boosted morale among ESA inspectors.

The cornerstone of the system is FieldWorker Enterprise, an application from Toronto-based FieldWorker Products Ltd. that enables exchange of corporate information with mobile workers

Embedded within FieldWorker Enterprise is SQL Anywhere, a database management system from Sybase iAnywhere Inc., the Waterloo, Ont.-based subsidiary of enterprise software and services firm, Sybase Inc.

As a mobile and embedded database, SQL Anywhere is widely used in various contexts. For instance:

- As an embedded database, it is used as an application data store. Its use in this way within Intuit QuickBooks enterprise accounting package helped increase performance by three to five times.

- It can be used as database server software for workgroups or for small or medium-sized businesses.

- In mobile computing environments, it supports and speeds up scalable data synchronization.

That's one of the main benefit it offers ESA inspectors and administrators.

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