Multi-trade property service company McDougall has boosted the productivity of its mobile workforce by 17% with the introduction of a BigChange service management system.
The firm provides all trades reactive repair services to social housing and new build sectors and has equipped its tradesmen and engineers with smartphones and tablets running JobWatch, part of the all-in-one solution from BigChange.
McDougall runs a fleet of 30 vans and 4x4s operating from offices in Grangemouth and Glasgow and is using BigChange to manage its entire mobile operation, with the cloud-based system handling all work planning, CRM, scheduling and reporting via Samsung tablets and phones. Integrated vehicle tracking and navigation provides live information for customer service with recorded data for billing, timesheets and driver duty of care.
“The introduction of BigChange has had a fundamental impact on the way we operate,” says David Robbie, managing director of the McDougall Group.“By automating job scheduling and routing, and cutting paperwork we have increased the number of jobs we can do with the same resources. Productivity has been boosted by 17% and mileage has been cut. It’s a move to real-time working which has allowed us to extend the working day.
“Our tradesmen no longer need to come in to get their jobs and are now on site an hour earlier and Gas Landlord and Electrical Certificates are delivered to clients electronically as soon as the job is complete. Tenants receive an appointment for every repair and text updates at every stage of the process. Customer Satisfaction is completed electronically for every job completed.
“We chose BigChange because we were looking for a fully integrated system between vehicle management and job scheduling, with the ability to invoice and ultimately track orders all the way through from start to finish. With previous systems there was always paper involved somewhere so we were looking for one system that was completely paperless, giving us real control and providing a proactive experience for the end customer,” he added.
