Richmond Refrigeration
"Overall as an owner and president, I have to say that getting WennSoft was the smartest thing we ever did."
John Lollar
President of Richmond Refrigeration
About Richmond Refrigeration
Richmond Refrigeration is a mechanical contractor that serves installation and service needs of supermarkets and convenience stores. They offer installation in Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. The company provides service to customers in select areas of Virginia, including those located within a 100 mile radius of Richmond and those located in Northwest Virginia.
The company has earned a reputation as one of the best installation contractors in the region. Their staff members always strive to provide customers with the best options in terms of function and aesthetics. Their customers have also come to depend on Richmond Refrigeration for providing honest and reliable service work, and for responding quickly and professionally. They do what they say, treat people like they want to be treated, and if a mistake occurs, they take responsibility and fix it.
Scenario
Richmond Refrigeration used to manage all aspects of their field technicians manually. This delayed invoicing, added overhead, resulted in more service call backs, and reduced the effectiveness of dispatching. To improve efficiencies and give them a competitive advantage, the company implemented WennSoft MobileTEC. MobileTEC is designed to improve the accuracy of data capture, guide decision making and enforce standards and best practices. It allows field staff to update schedules, add parts and materials usage, record expenses, send and receive e-mail messages, manage scheduled maintenance in addition to eliminating redundant or inefficient data entry. Richmond Refrigeration worked with Lexacom DBA as The Halden Group to implement the WennSoft MobileTEC as well as Service Management Series and Job Cost. For over twenty years, they have been helping clients optimize their use of Microsoft Dynamics GP software, making them more efficient and their businesses more profitable. Richmond Refrigeration rolled out MobileTEC slowly. First they had one technician use it as a pilot project, which showed many efficiencies and great potential to help the business. They now have 19 technicians using MobileTEC.
Faster Invoicing
Prior to using WennSoft, time worked against Richmond Refrigeration, especially when it came to processing invoices. The company struggled to get paperwork from the technicians in a timely manner – all their technicians have fax machines, but it usually took a few days after a job was completed before they submitted the paperwork. This delayed the processing of invoices, which ultimately delayed the receipt of customer payments. The result was a greater burden on the company’s finances, since they continually spent money servicing their customers – money for parts, labor, gas for the trucks, etc.
“Most of your customers will pay within 30 days, some might push it to 45,” said Lollar. “When you’re doing a lot of jobs, the credit you’re carrying can add up in a hurry.”
It used to take them 5 to 8 business days to get an invoice processed. Now that they are using MobileTEC, they’re able to process invoices in a day and a half.
“Our line of credit with the bank hasn’t been as high as it has in the past because we’re getting money in more quickly,” said Lollar. “Even with a difficult economy, we’re receiving payments in a shorter amount of time because we get the invoices in our customers’ hands more quickly.”
Better Inventory Control In order to provide the best customer service and reduce costs, Richmond Refrigeration strives to stock the right parts on all the technicians’ trucks. When they were managing their technicians manually, this was challenging and inconsistent.
When a technician used a part, the replacement wasn’t reordered by the warehouse until the paperwork was received. Since they experienced significant lag time in getting the paperwork, it was common for technicians to go a week before getting their parts inventory replaced.
“If a technician has to wait five days before the parts on their truck are replenished, they may not have the parts they need to do the job,” said Lollar. “That leads to poor customer service.”
With MobileTEC, technicians enter the parts they are using as they perform the work, thus eliminating the lag time. Richmond Refrigeration’s back office staff can review all the batches at the end of the day and post the inventory changes, so the warehouse staff gets a list of the parts that need to be replenished.
Richmond Refrigeration also set up parameters in the software, so the warehouse is notified if any truck reaches a minimum number of units on any particular part. The warehouse can either send the replacement parts to the technician or order it to a supply house near the technician. “It used to take up 8 days to replenish the inventory on the trucks, now the longest it takes is a day and a half,” said Lollar.
In the event that a technician completely runs out of a part, MobileTEC enables Richmond Refrigeration to review the parts inventory on all the trucks in the field to determine if someone near that technician has the part.
Reducing Call Backs and Superior Customer Service
Prior to using MobileTEC, when Richmond Refrigeration’s technicians went on a service call, they didn’t always know the previous work on a piece of equipment. This limited their ability to fix the problem. For example, one of their technicians might be working on on a rack system at local supermarket, which has five compressors. A technician might fix one thing, but something else could be wrong, and the technician would have no idea because they weren’t familiar with the history.
With MobileTEC, the technician can easily look at the history for the piece of equipment prior to beginning any work.
“When they’re seeing the history of the previous technicians’ work, they can spot trends more effectively. This helps us fix things right so we know we’re not going to get a call back,” said Lollar.
MobileTEC is reducing the number of call backs, which cuts costs on their maintenance contracts. MobileTEC has also resulted in an unexpected benefit: an increased sense of pride.
“When our technicians are working with a customer and they use their laptop to perform their work, they feel like they’re among the elite in the industry,” said Lollar. “There is hardly anyone else in the United States that has anything like this.”
Being able to look at the customer history also helps managers, because they are able to answer customer questions immediately.
“Before we had MobileTEC, it could take a manager a day or two to find out the background from the technician and get back to the customer,” said Lollar. “Now, we can answer a customer’s questions while they’re still on the phone, which goes a long way toward maintaining the relationship.”
More Efficient Service Call Management
MobileTEC has made Richmond Refrigeration more productive by improving the way they manage the data entry related to service calls.
They used to have two administrators entering notes about work history and technician labor, which took approximately five hours a day. Now the technicians enter this info on site as part of their normal routine.
“WennSoft made us more efficient, which allows our administrators to help out in other areas of the company,” said Lollar.
The company also used to have problems when they would get calls on the weekend. When a technician got a call over the weekend, they would write up a manual work order and give it to an administrator on Monday.
“Monday morning would be a log jam because we had to rush to create all these service IDs,” said Lollar. “It also delayed getting the replacement parts to the technicians because we had to order them after creating the service order.”
With MobileTEC, the technician can generate the service call ID themselves and input all the relevant information.
A Bright Future
Richmond has been very pleased with their WennSoft solution, and they look forward to continued success with MobileTEC, Job Cost and Service Management Series.
“Overall as an owner and president, I have to say that getting WennSoft was the smartest thing we ever did,” said Lollar.
To learn more about how WennSoft Solutions can have a similar impact on your organization, please contact us at 262-821-4100 or info@wennsoft.com.