In the past ten years, Queensland-based telecom firm ECO Communications has grown from a handful of techs and sales personnel to a couple of dozen people.
It’s now been a year and a half since they signed up for WORKetc Quickstart. In that time, they’ve seen first-hand how an integrated business management system can drastically improve a company’s efficiency.
But don’t just take our word for it.
The company’s Technical Director, David Towers, recently shared with us exactly how much time and money WORKetc has saved for them.
Slowed Down by Old Manual Processes
Time and money saved by ECO Communications thanks to WORKetc. Click for full view.With their old system, the firm’s on-site techs were forced to waste a sizeable chunk of their workday on something as mundane as time tracking.
According to David, much of the wasted time was due to the fact that their techs not only had to track time manually, they also had to manually note down client and job details.
Here’s the old process that ECO Communications’s techs used daily:
- Step 1. Tech would get in car and have to manually note down time, customer name, job number, and activity type (travel or onsite etc).
- Step 2. When tech arrived at client’s premises, he would then have to manually note down time of arrival.
- Step 3. Tech would have to manually note time of job completion.
- Step 4. Tech would have to provide a full day’s worth of manual timesheets to the tech manager at the end of each day.
All of this manual tracking ended up taking each tech about an hour per day — an hour that David estimates could have translated to a tech managing to squeeze in at least one extra on-site job per day.
Saving Time with WORKetc
By giving their techs access to the WORKetc desktop timer on their Surface tablets, ECO Communications was able to cut that time to a mere 20 minutes total per day.
Plus, the techs could easily attach every single timesheet to the proper client and support case.
Here’s their new WORKetc-based process:
- Step 1. Tech starts timer in car and selects client and support case.
- Step 2. Tech stops timer upon arrival at client’s premises.
- Step 3. Tech starts timer again when starting the job.
- Step 4. Tech stops timer upon job completion.
ECO Communications’s savings of 40 minutes per tech, per day, could easily translate to a total of 160 man hours saved per tech, per year.
David says that each on-site job earns them an average of AU$350 in revenues, so if a tech squeezes in one additional job per day thanks to the time saved, that could add up to a total of AU$56,000 in extra annual revenues for the company per tech.
It’s not just the on-site techs that are reaping the benefits of tracking time with WORKetc.
The company’s tech manager, who calculates all billable hours at the end of each month, used to do it by manually plugging in the techs’ timesheet data into a spreadsheet.
This was only done once a month, but the process took an entire eight-hour workday.
Now that EcoComm’s techs enter their daily timesheets into WORKetc, the tech manager can simply run a smartlist to check their billable hours.
Instead of spending hours entering data into a spreadsheet, the tech manager can now get each and every tech’s billable hours in 10 minutes.
The techs don’t have to see the tech manager at the end of their shifts to submit their timesheets, either, since the timesheet data is already in WORKetc.
Plus, it cuts the danger of timesheets getting lost before they’re submitted.
This frees up the tech manager to focus on other critical aspects of the business.
ECO Communications’s old business management system wasn’t just holding the company’s growth back, it presented the very real danger of the company losing out on billable dollars that fall through the cracks.
With both their in-office support agents and their on-site techs saving time and money by using WORKetc, the company is now well poised to experience even further growth down the line.
