How to Reduce Your Expenses
As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. What you don’t know is there are further hidden, expensive...
Read morePen and Paper Almost A Full Time Job
City Generators is a family business established in 1986, specialising in generator sales, servicing and maintenance. In 2004, youngest son Michael Mansey joined the business and began his apprenticeship to become a diesel mechanic, the Service Manager and is now Managing Director for the business. “We’re all diesel mechanics and I joined my two brothers to help run the company our parents started in 1986,” said Michael.
City Generators’ business has two major streams: sales and service/maintenance. The team installs generators in various places such as data centres, hospitals and nursing homes; providing these important establishments with backup emergency power should they experience electrical failures. They also provide maintenance service to all types of generators. The servicing of these generators alone keeps Michael and his brothers busy with over 300 customers each per quarter needing service and maintenance checks.
Managing Time Shouldn’t Be This Hard
Time is a scarce resource when managing such a large customer database, on top of the new customers requiring generators where an installation could take between three to six months to complete. Previously, the company would operate using traditional methods of pen, paper and Outlook calendar. The original process was almost a full time job for Michael, taking him or any of his admin team around 3-5 working days to complete the scheduling and dispatching of jobs for the following week.
“We would also hold monthly meetings where our team would be given a 20 page document detailing their jobs for the month. At the top would be the monthly calendar containing a top line view of what was scheduled. Any daily communication would be done via email or phone. We would need to rely on our field teams to read the communication and understand what was going on. I got extremely frustrated with this process however I am grateful that we have good employees who took ownership of the work they are given,” said Michael.
Time Away Gives Perspective
“I stepped out of the scheduling role for 18 months while I took on more responsibility. When I returned with a fresh perspective it was then I knew our processes had to change. Fortunately we had a business consultant who had been working with us for a couple of years, they had been emphasising how important it was to streamline our business processes and recommended Work,” he added.
Since City Generators migrated their business operations to Work, a mobile based user intuitive platform, it has given Michael time back to focus on strategy, project management, and new business.
“With so many customers and multiple work sites, it’s not uncommon for us to have clients call us requesting job information from work we may have completed months prior. With Work I can log in and provide them with specific details of that job. I use sub-contractors too as we do get projects in NSW and ACT too. I can add the sub-contractors into Work and dispatch work to them the same way I would my permanent employees. Everyone is getting quality and timely information, and due to it being mobile, I’m getting quality and timely information back,” said Michael.