Fox Service Company: Streamlining Operations
"A great feature of WennSoft is its flexibility. They are not too narrow or too wide within an industry; WennSoft understands what a company wants and needs. They help set expectations at implementation and then help a company crawl, walk, run and then fly in achieving its goals."
Robert Nagel
President and Chief Executive Officer, Fox Service Company
Fox Service Company of Austin, Texas, (www.foxservice.com) has been locally owned and operated since 1972. Today, Fox Service is the largest, multi-trade service provider in central Texas. Residential services include air-conditioning, heating, plumbing and electrical systems. Commercial services include repair, installation and maintenance of HVAC, plumbing, electrical systems and food service equipment in office buildings, industrial facilities, restaurants and retail and convenience stores. Fox Service has nearly 240 employees and more than 180 vehicles and serves an area within a 75-mile radius of Austin.
Fox Service entered the 21st century still utilizing a custom-written, MS DOS®-based software program that had been in service since 1990. Modifications had been made to the system over time and staff was acclimated to their existing solution’s limitations, but they reached the point that upgrading to something more advanced became essential.
In 2001, the owners first began investigating the switch to a new software platform. Ownership saw new technologies that had been developed during Y2K preparations and the search was on to secure the perfect business solution.
Robert Nagel joined Fox Service Company in 2005 to lead restructuring efforts of the company, including enterprise-wide systems implementation. Nagel now serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. Though still searching various solutions at that time, Nagel said, “WennSoft came to our attention rather quickly during the research process as we explored various options with people inside and outside our company.”
“Most of our management team had not been through a software upgrade of any kind and had never been active participants in the selection or implementation process of an enterprisewide system upgrade,” Nagel said. “It was a big eye-opener for most of the people on our team; however, now that we have successfully been through the selection and implementation process, our team understands the WennSoft application extremely well.”
“We discontinued our mechanical and electrical new-construction divisions in 2006 to concentrate on our repair and retrofit divisions; however, we continue to perform a high volume of retrofit jobs in our residential and commercial mechanical, electrical and plumbing divisions,” Nagel said. “Residential retrofit can have 35 - 40 jobs open at a time, while the commercial side can have 20 - 25 jobs open at a time.”
Part of the overall company vision
Nagel said that steps taken in recent years are part of the overall vision Fox Service’s leadership has for the company. From a technical standpoint, that vision is wireless and paperless. “We started with outdated Legacy technology, and have taken a phased approach to achieve our overall technology and operational goals. Moving to the WennSoft platform was a large and necessary first step that now enables us to deploy additional technologies with the ultimate result being field mobile technologies.” But change comes with challenges, some of them internal.
“There is always difficulty in moving to a new enterprisewide application for every organization, and Fox was no exception,” Nagel admitted. “People get used to doing business a particular way – for 18 years in our case, and changing the mindset was the first big challenge. This coupled with the training requirements means that change can be met with a great deal of resistance; however we can now see light at the end of the tunnel, and know that our decision to select WennSoft was a good one.”
Change to WennSoft helps spur company philosophical change
The shift to WennSoft coincided with Fox Service’s desire to make changes to increase productivity across the board within the company.
“As management, we saw the opportunity to streamline our administrative and field operations by embracing newer technologies. WennSoft gives us the platform to implement cross-functional and cross-trained teams inside our organization that we believe can lead to greater efficiencies and accountability, as well as better customer service and more scalable operations. As we achieve desirable results and build confidence in the system, we will continue to implement improvements in phases ultimately leading to field mobile technologies.” Nagel said. “We must have a high level of confidence and consistency in the core application and its performance before we can move to more advanced features and applications.”
What about the occasional naysayer who does not believe the changes Nagel and Fox Service are trying to implement will work within their company? Jim Wenninger, WennSoft Chief Executive Officer, addressed that at Synergy ’07 – the WennSoft customer conference – when he introduced Nagel to several longtime mechanical contractor customers.
“I’m a huge believer in user forums – like the WennSoft Unified Users Forum – or peer groups,” Nagel said. “Sitting down with another mechanical contractor or service provider is beneficial because they know what our world looks like every day. I have become friends with several of them since signing on with WennSoft, and the sharing of their experiences have been very beneficial and a huge help to our team.”
“As a result, when I get pushback from management or other people in our company who say, ‘well, that’s theory and it doesn’t work in the real world.’ I tell them, ‘Let me introduce you to company A, B or C; they have been running their business this way for more than five years, and it’s not theory, it’s reality.’ That goes a long way with our management team.”
After working with WennSoft for more than a year, Nagel speaks of the ongoing relationship like the veteran of corporate re-tooling that he is.
“A great feature of WennSoft is its flexibility,” Nagel said. “They are not too narrow or too wide within an industry; WennSoft understands what a company wants and needs. They help set expectations at implementation and then help a company crawl, walk, run and then fly in achieving its goals.”
As for Synergy, Nagel returned for the ’08 conference, but this time he was supported by other members of the Fox Service staff.
“I brought four other managers with me and we had a lot better feel for the product,” he said. “Our conversations with WennSoft staff and other users were much more in depth after having a year getting familiar with the product. I think we were able to ask more intelligent questions.”