14
BUSINESS AND TRAINING
A fully mobile paperless
plumbing business
By
Eamonn Ryan
Burgess Plumbing runs off a live, fully automated system
which tracks, follows and measures its plumbing and sales
staff, and is on the verge of going completely paperless.
Knowing via a single dashboard where each team
is in real time facilitates the allocation of jobs to the
nearest team and based on the type of job, enables
the plumber with the appropriate experience to be
despatched. This all saves time and money.
The company has acquired a locally-developed fully
paperless administration system, with each team
equipped with tablets. This is more affordable than one
of the systems such as SAP or Oracle, and the company
has a full-time programmer on the staff to write software
as needed, says Craig Preston, Managing Director of
Burgess Plumbing. This is managed from a manned
control centre, the nerve centre of the business where
each of the 38 team is tracked on a screen – the systems
control dashboard.
All photos by Eamonn Ryan
Each of the 38 team is tracked on the systems control dashboard.
Such a system became necessary as the company has
grown – today logging on a large number of jobs a day,
says Preston. For this volume of work, in addition to the
38 teams it has approximately 45 vehicles, including
salespeople. All jobs are logged on the system via a
24-hour call centre, directed to a team’s device and
thereafter its status monitored on the dashboard which
tracks each vehicle and team. Knowing via a single
dashboard where each team is in real time facilitates
the allocation of jobs to the nearest team and based on
the type of job enables the plumber with the appropriate
experience to be sent. This all saves time and money. All
the customer-focused documentation is on the tablet on
which sign-off can take place.
“Vehicle tracking is vital because, after salaries, transport
costs are our biggest expense. When a team is not
presently busy with a job, they will wait at a central location
from which they can be despatched rather than incur the
cost of constantly returning to the office. What we also
often do is run two jobs from a single team/vehicle – one
being a big job which they can work on longer term while
sending a smaller team as needed to do smaller jobs. That
keeps staff busy for longer.
All jobs are logged on the system via a 24-hour call centre, directed to a team’s device and
thereafter its status monitored on the dashboard which tracks each vehicle and team.
“It never used to be possible for us to have a live system,
but technology has only now caught up. Our road-bound
people don’t need to be in the office because we can track
them constantly with regard to time, distance travelled and
products consumed on a job. Every call that comes in is
www.plumbingafrica.co.za @plumbingonline @plumbingonline @PlumbingAfricaOnline October 2020 Volume 26 I Number 08