Cloud technology helps triple volume of work

Through funding made available via the Home and Community Care (HACC) program, a well-known national charity’s Gold Coast brand is providing basic support services to qualifying clients and their carers to assist them to continue living independently at home. One of the key services provided is garden maintenance. In June 2014, the Australian Care & Support Network won the tender to provide Lawn Mow and Yard Tidy services to clients of the charity.

Nicki and Tony Hale founded ACSN after selling their 120 employee-strong communications company in the UK and moving to Australia. Despite the ACSN team having minimal gardening experience, their background in running high-volume, field-based work management operations was the key to their success. Importantly, they also presented a strong technical capability in the form of Fleetmatics WORK, aimed at streamlining administration and field-worker communication.

A newly formed business, ACSN needed to find and deploy a capable job management system that would handle tracking, booking, scheduling and then invoicing a large number of jobs for a multiple-user base.

“We needed a platform that would handle high volumes of enquiries, but that could also incorporate custom processes and criteria,” said Tony. “There are strict reporting and audit requirements, so we had to make sure we could accommodate this.”

To therefore further support ACSN’s data capabilities, they engaged IT consultant Steve Voegt of Central Business Data after an introduction from Fleetmatics WORK support. The flexible Fleetmatics WORK API meant Steve was able to develop a custom portal through which Tony and his team could quickly perform repetitive functions.

An example is the one-click quality audit job creator, which presents admin staff with a list of relevant fields of finished jobs that they can quickly review and then click to have their status changed to completed. The creator can also add an invoice item (based on field workers’ timestamps and start/finish questions) and automatically create and dispatch a new job populated with all the information required for an auditor to attend a site and review and report on the work done.

Using the API and some custom development enabled ACSN to scale up its operations with only a minor increase in administrative overheads. CB Data also provide ACSN with dynamic financial reporting and tracking.

The quality audit process ensures every job is essential for minimising fraud, which is a risk wherever a government subsidy or funding is provided. It also enables ACSN to collect rebooking requests on behalf of their client, taking pressure off their call centres, which ultimately resulted in a large increase in sales. Since ACSN has taken on the management of the business and implemented Fleetmatics WORK, the work volume has increased by over 350%.

But the benefits don’t just stop there. All resources can work remotely, resulting in the company being able to expand into a wider geographical area, and Tony can forecast jobs in advance and, thus, work schedules and revenue pipelines.

“An online system and capturing live data has multiple advantages,” said Tony. “We save in admin costs, we have OHS visibility and, most importantly, we can log job sheets, review schedules, and upload job documentation and job progress from the field. Additionally, we eliminate paperwork, ensuring important information isn’t left on scrap pieces of paper to be lost!”

Fleetmatics WORK assists Australian businesses to mobilise their field and job management. The platform gives you the tools and insights to better manage jobs from the office to the field. With real-time updates, customisable schedulers and more, Fleetmatics WORK goes one step further, making your business operations easy to understand so you can put your business intelligence to work.