Small business finds big benefits

For over 30 years, Pestrid has been providing pest control management to an extensive client base across the Sydney metropolitan area. As this small family business expands, owner and director Gary Eastwood is proud of the Pestrid team delivering on the foundation values of Pestrid - providing customers with professional, safe and effective pest control, as well as excellent customer service.

Imarda has been helping the team execute these values, providing Pestrid with field management software for over a decade and helping the company save time and reduce costs. 

Imarda’s platform i360 “well and truly pays for itself”, according to Eastwood, referring to his ability to ensure that his workers have the right jobs at the right time. Using i360, he can easily locate and dispatch jobs to his nearest available workers, avoiding unnecessarily long travel time.

With complete visibility of his entire workforce while out in the field, Eastwood has also curtailed workers using Pestrid’s equipment and stock to complete personal cash jobs, eliminating stock shrinkage and lost revenue. “It completely eliminated all moonlighting,” said Eastwood.

Eastwood has also found that by optimising route usage and dispatching jobs effectively to avoid long travel time, Pestrid has reduced its environmental impact and the amount of fuel his business uses.

With the help of i360, time management is vastly improved. Eastwood’s workers now spend far less time on the phone to the back office and are spending more of their time on job sites completing the work required.

Eastwood initially expected his workers to feel as though i360 was “Big Brother”. However, he soon found that his workers preferred having i360 because they were no longer required to complete time-consuming paperwork. “Workers can easily view job details and do not need to deal with paperwork [or] spend vast amounts of time on the phone to the office,” he said.

Customer service is always a priority and Eastwood uses the reporting functionality within i360 to approach any customer complaint with ease. “In our business, any complaints we have don’t occur immediately - by having historical data within the system, we can look back at when the job occurred to verify what’s happened,” he said. This ability to look back and verify the work his team completed has been vital.

When speaking to new customers about how Pestrid can provide the service levels they do, Eastwood explains the role i360 has within Pestrid, demonstrating how the technology enables him and his team to back up their promises and work with visible facts.

With Imarda’s focus on innovation in the fleet management space, Pestrid is looking to upgrade its hardware to uncover more ways it can become more efficient using i360, so the companies will continue to grow together. According to Eastwood, “we simply couldn’t run the business effectively without it”.