Bring Your Office to the Field

By Karen L. Edwards, RCS Editor.

When your field team has the right tools and accurate information, your business will thrive.

I had the opportunity to speak with Eleanor Gach, Content Director at Jobba Trade Technologies, who brings an interesting perspective to the industry. Before joining the technology company, Eleanor worked for two prominent roofing contractors where she had the opportunity to implement Jobba Trade Technologies’ flagship software, FCS, at both companies.

Eleanor shared with me some of the challenges that the contractors she worked for were facing. “It was taking us 60 days to turn around an invoice,” she explained. “By the time we could collect all the photos from the field and manually enter the information to create an invoice, two months had passed.”

This was not good for cash flow or for customers who weren’t happy receiving their invoice so long after the work was performed. Enter technology. Once the system was set up and functioning, the invoice turnaround time went from 60 days to 3 days!

I asked Eleanor how the team in the field responded to using the system. “The techs in the field were actually the quickest to adopt the technology,” stated Eleanor. “The crews take so much pride in their work; it’s an art for them. Giving them the tool to showcase their work in real time made them very proud. It almost became a competition to see who could get their information and photos submitted first.” Eleanor also explained that most of the workers were already comfortable using smart phones, so it wasn’t hard for them to get used to using the technology.

Implementing FCS also had a huge return on investment when it came to payroll. “It used to take 10 admins to collect all the timecards, manually enter the information and send it to our payroll company,” Eleanor said. “After implementing the technology that was reduced to one person spending two half days.”

The technology was also immensely helpful following severe weather events. They would have a tremendous list of properties in need of service. “We would find that multiple employees would show up at the same building, and we would have duplicate reports on same building,” explained Eleanor. “With the new system in place we were able to generate specific tickets that were assigned to specific people. We were also able to systemize our process. What would previously take months for us to clean up we could do in a week or two.”

Another advantage that she noticed right away was how much more efficient their leak response crews were able to be. “Say you have a crew responding to 8 different buildings in one day and each of those buildings has different requirements,” said Eleanor. “There may be specific contacts, different roof access points, different ladder height requirements. Instead of having to try to coordinate that information with someone back in the office, the crews are able to instantly have the information for each property right on their phone.”

Eleanor said that her experience implementing the new technology was truly a game changer. It requires the contractor to step back and examine their processes. Then they can realign and build them back out in the software.

Jobba Trade Technologies was great in terms of providing support for the implementation. “They have always been great. We had a lot of needs during and after implementation and every question that I had or whatever support I needed, they always did their best to provide great customer service,” she concluded.

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