As part of its provision of reactive repair services to social housing providers, McDougall Group has boosted the productivity of its mobile workforce with the introduction of mobile working software from BigChange.
McDougall’s entire mobile operations in central Scotland are managed using BigChange, 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.
David Robbie, managing director, McDougall Group, said, “We chose BigChange because we were looking for a fully-integrated system between vehicle management and job scheduling, with the ability to invoice and track orders from start to finish. With previous systems there was always paper involved somewhere so we wanted one system that was completely paperless.
“The introduction of BigChange has had a huge impact on how we operate. By automating job scheduling, vehicle routing and cutting paperwork, we have increased the number of jobs we can do with the same resources. Productivity has been boosted by almost 20 per cent and mileage has been cut.”
Using BigChange, McDougall’s tradesmen no longer need to come in to get their jobs and are now on site an hour earlier, and gas and electrical certificates are delivered to customers electronically as soon as each job is finished. Tenants receive an appointment for every repair and text updates at every stage of the process.
Robbie said, “BigChange provides valuable management information for tighter control over operations. Introducing new technology to manage our operations is a one-off opportunity to re-engineer the business.
“It basically puts the onus on our tradesmen to adhere to good working practices and proper procedures and that ultimately means a more professional, more efficient and better organised business, and taking a mandatory photograph of completed jobs introduces an element of self-auditing, ensuring the standard of work is always high.”
