Construction Services

Prestige Pop-up Sprinklers is a family owned and operated business that provides commercial and residential irrigation services to the Calgary area. This establish company has been in business for over 20 years and has developed a sizeable customer base.

The company came to SoftElephant in need of a solution that would handle their operations from the initial call for service to the final billing for that service. They had been using a paper based system for scheduling and invoicing. The company's customer base and customer demands had exceeded the abilities of the existing system.

Through a complete consultation process SoftElephant and Prestige Pop-up Sprinklers determined that the major areas of concern were:

Tracking service requests from customers.
Scheduling service crews.
Invoicing customers in a timely manner.
Efficient scheduling of customers during the winterization season.
Employee and expense tracking.

Using a Rapid Application Development platform we were able to create a system in 3 months that provided key benefits addressing the customers needs.

Tracking Service Requests

Implemented a work order system that would not lose the customer requests. Once a work order was created, it could be scheduled.
Enabled the office receptionist to schedule work orders against multiple crews and generated a daily work sheet that service crews would record service activities.
Added a tracking step where the receptionist would enter the daily work activities of the service crews and allowed the receptionist insight to what went on in the field. The system would allow follow up work orders if the customer request was not complete. This reduced the tracking burden of the office staff.

Service Crew Scheduling

Implemented a service crew scheduling system that allowed multiple service crews to be assigned work orders.
Work orders could be transferred between service crews depending on external factors, such as breakdowns or difficult service calls.
Allowed for appointments where services crews had to be on site between certain times and non-appointment times where the service crew was not required on site at any given time.
Allowed the flexible movement of staff between service crews to enable dynamic changing of service crew size based on the schedule work order.

Invoicing

Upon completion of the work order the office staff would generate an invoice based on the crews work.
The invoicing system allowed managers to review and approve invoices before being sent.
The system recorded the payment status of invoices to help manage account receivable.
A flexible reporting system was implemented to allow the exportation of reports to 3rd party accounting applications.
Invoicing was expanded in include online bill payment with credit card.

Batch Scheduling

The irrigation business has an unique requirement in the cold northerly climates where sprinkler systems need to be winterized. The winterization process uses compressed air to vacate water out of the irrigation system to allow freezing without damage. During a 6 week period, Prestige Pop-up Sprinklers, would be required to visit all of their customers around the city to complete the winterization.

To assist in the quick and efficient scheduling of these work orders, we created a system that would schedule winterization on a community by community basis. The process would generate a customized letter to the customer telling them when their service would be completed. It allowed the office staff to give the customer a reminder call and pre-bill the work order so that service crews could bill on-site.

This process saved 2 weeks of man power to schedule according to the old process. Empowered customers to know when their system was going to be winterized and provided them with peace of mind that their irrigation systems would not freeze. The change in billing saw an instance reduction of payment delay from 7-10 days down to 2-5 days.

Employee and Expense Tracking

In addition to supporting the core duties of the service crews, the system was able to consolidate the employee time reporting and expense tracking. This allowed for simple employee time sheet tracking and fast employee reimbursement of expenses. Employees would receive their pay cheques without having the office staff hunt them down for their time sheets.

In Conclusion...

SoftElephant worked with Prestige Pop-up Sprinklers to create a customized solution that addressed their specific needs to increase employee satisfaction, customer retention and retained business profits while securing future growth.

If you have a business that needs software to fit you, instead of you changing to fit the software, contact us and we will be glad to help you grow your business to the next level.

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