Total Integrated Solutions Case Study
COLLABARO SERVICES
Bespoke product application
Onboarding
Training
Support
Consultancy
Business Intelligence
FIRE & SECURITY
TIS is an independent systems integrator specialising in driving digital transformation and integration across the life safety, security and communications industry. They design, install and maintain smart, reliable and highly-compliant fire protection, access control, security, intruder alert, CCTV and communications solutions for retirement villages, care homes, universities, public spaces and the Ministry of Defence.
TIS founded in 1948 operate across 5 offices with 150+ employees. They have protected thousands of sites to date and manage a 24/7 service.
Challenge
When TIS first approached Collabaro they faced several common challenges of an expanding company with ambitious growth targets. Many of them were administrative but unique to the field-service industry they also faced the challenge of assuring compliance, exacerbated by their overall lack of field engineer visibility. All in all this made sending jobs to the field and staying up to date with their status an administrative strain, especially considering required response times, associated SLAs and compliance expectations.
On top of their own requirements TIS customers requested time-consuming monthly summaries that relied heavily on manual data collection. Manually collated data dependence created admin heavy workflows resulting in increased room for human error and unreliability.
Requirement
TIS presented their requirements to drive an increase in engineer utilisation by 10%. This would be achieved through providing administrative teams with real-time job updates and insights in engineer work patterns. The goal was set to additionally reduce back-office administration through automated service invoicing and provide their clients with direct access to service data using a Client Portal, enhancing their overall customer value proposition.
Solution
TIS invested in Collabaro to allow them to increase the size of their field team without the mutual need to increase their back-office staff. After reviewing TIS’ operational processes and software used we identified 4 key areas of workflow automation to support this intention:
Compliance
The TIS planned maintenance service has been transformed. Every test on every device is recorded on our iOS app with a digital time, location and user stamp logged against it, leaving no room for ambiguity or error. Data collected in the field is then packaged into a detailed client report, generated with a single click of a button.
Communication
Clients can now be kept in the loop with real-time status updates available through a dedicated portal, meanwhile a BI dashboard keeps the executive team up to date with performance metrics tracked over time. The client portal automates real-time planned maintenance, post-visit reports and certificates, saving time and improving data accuracy.
Integration
Collabaro is integrated with several TIS core systems spanning finance, HR and fleet management. Integrations allow otherwise repetitive manual data transfer between software to be eliminated. Smoother processes are now in place ranging from engineer absences used for scheduling, to transferring of work orders to vehicles and live location tracking. The client billing process was streamlined using Collabaro’s billing and invoice automation rules, integrated into Microsoft Business Central.
Invoicing
TIS can now automatically generate and post a service invoice as soon as the field engineer finishes the job. Client-specific invoicing rules are applied to the time recorded and parts entered by the engineer, using the iOS app.
Outcome
Collabaro has increased engineer utilisation from 70% to 80+%, providing a significant contribution to net profits. Collabaro automation has successfully reduced the ratio between TIS’s back-office service professionals and field-based service engineers. The new client portal has encouraged a closer partnership between key TIS clients through increasing transparency and speed of information sharing.
“Introducing Collabaro has given us a capability to critically analyse all areas of service performance and contract profitability; exactly what we needed to effectively manage the growth of the business.
As part of the project, Collabaro challenged our management team and made them rethink how we did things. We changed some of our processes, and the Collabaro team suggested new ways of working beyond the original scope. We welcomed the fresh thinking and the reassurance that they took the time to understand our business and our growth objectives.
We worked in partnership to define a digital transformation project that involved developing on top of the existing Collabaro functionality, features and processes which were more aligned to the Fire & Security sector.”
James Twigg, CEO Total Integrated Solutions (TIS) Ltd