Fords South West, a home services company offering heating, plumbing and electrical trades, has rolled out a field service management system from BigChange. The system, which live-links operatives and engineers with the office, has enabled Fords to achieve a 10-20 percent increase in jobs, save hundreds of hours a week, and go 95 percent paper free.
Working with residents and commercial operations, such as schools, care homes and holiday parks, Fords has evolved during its 100-plus year history and now offers a complete home services package including heating, plumbing, and electrical, as well as kitchen and bathroom design and installation, and Home Cover packages.
Before adopting BigChange, Fords relied on a dated CRM system which had been in use since the 90’s. “Our previous system held the details of every job we have created in the last 30 years, including the first ever trial job which was to bake a cake,” commented Jack Caine, Contracts Manager at Fords South West. “As you can imagine this made it very slow; up to 15 minutes to retrieve client details or job records, and it was also going to be very expensive to update.
“Having visited the BigChange offices, our Directors were impressed with what they saw; they liked the system and the features it offered, and the people they engaged with, and they felt comfortable with the ethos and atmosphere.”
Using the 6-in1 BigChange solution, which incorporates a mobile workforce app, customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, live tracking, financial management, and business intelligence tools, in one platform, Fords has seen significant impacts in three key areas of the business; paper, time, and communication. By automating routine processes, and removing the company’s reliance on paper, BigChange, now part of the Simpro Group of companies, has removed much of the daily admin resource required to run and support Fords’ mobile operation.
“Looking at our routine tasks and processes we knew what we needed to change but we didn’t realise how much impact this would have,” Caine continued. “We knew our system was slow and outdated, and as a result so were our workflows, but the difference is amazing. Now we are up to speed with the system we are seeing measurable improvements across the board.”
Since implementing BigChange, Fords has transformed the management of its mobile workforce from being 100 percent paper based to virtually paper free, realising both financial and environmental savings. The move to digital has also resulted in significant operational and administration efficiencies.
“Before BigChange engineers and field operatives had to physically collect paper work packs from the office, and plan their day accordingly. Worksheets and test results were then written up on-site and transcribed from paper to the CRM by the engineer at a later date or by an admin resource. When you factor in time spent trying to locate the customer site, calls from customers requesting updates, ordering parts required, and scheduling future works, it amounts to a significant number of hours spent planning, communicating, and reporting, rather than doing the actual job.
“A conservative estimate is that using BigChange to automate routine tasks has reduced the number of hours per engineer, per day, spent on administration by at least 2,” Caine concluded. “When you scale this up across the workforce and factor in back-office savings as well I would say BigChange has saved in the region of 25,000 man-hours per year. These are tangible savings that we can feed back into the business to support future growth in terms of geographical coverage and service offering.”
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