Responsible for the fire protection in many of Northern Ireland’s health and education facilities, Noel Singleton, Service Manager of DB McLarnon Fire Protection Agency explains why they trust WorkPal, the mobile workflow management solution, to help them manage the vital maintenance of thousands of fire extinguishers and alarms.
DB MCLARNON
DB McLarnon are one of Northern Ireland’s leading independent fire protection agencies, with over 30 years’ experience. The family run business is responsible for the maintenance of Health Trusts, Education Boards and private sector fire alarms and fire extinguishers. They also provide fire protection training and additional fire safety equipment.
DB MCLARNON’S JOB MANAGEMENT ISSUES
Noel explains, “We were working with an antiquated, paper based system, which had worked well for 20 odd years, but we had outgrown it and we needed to bring ourselves into the twenty-first century.
“Every Saturday I had to trawl through a spreadsheet and try to split jobs into geographical areas. Then I would create weekly engineer job sheets, print them out and place them, along with all the other relevant paperwork, into the engineers’ trays. So it was quite a laborious task that took up most of my Saturday.”
DB McLarnon approached Barclay Communications, who also supplied their mobile phones, looking for a more effective job allocation system that would be easy to manage, save time and eliminate the chance of missed jobs. Barclay Communications’ sister company, WorkPal, fitted their requirements perfectly.
THE WORKPAL SOLUTION
WorkPal supplied DB McLarnon with their end-to-end job management system, which DB McLarnon also opted to integrate into their accountancy package.
WorkPal now enables DB McLarnon to quickly send job details to an engineer’s mobile app, which they use on-site to complete documentation, take pictures, capture clients’ signatures and more.
Once a job is completed, all the information is automatically synced back to the office, invoices can be generated, service histories are created and recurring maintenance is automatically scheduled.
BENEFITS OF WORKPAL
“All our customer information is available at the touch of a button. For example one of our engineers went out last week to fit three new fire extinguishers at a large site. Before he would have only been able to install them but now, with WorkPal, he was also able to add them onto the client’s asset register and the yearly maintenance schedule before he even left the site.
“It’s real time, you can’t lose anything, you’ve got traceability and a tracking history. It’s just brilliant and it is simplifying things for us.”
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ENHANCED BUSINESS CAPABILITIES
“WorkPal makes things quick. We have to be fairly reactive and with call-outs it’s great, because we can see who the closest engineer is and quickly send them the job.
“Sometimes, for whatever reason, our engineers are unable to complete a job and before we had to rely on them phoning it in. Then we highlighted it on a spreadsheet and reallocated it the following week. Now, with WorkPal it is far easier to manage, you immediately see what jobs weren’t closed and within 10 seconds we can switch a job over to another engineer in the area.
“We’re ensuring jobs don’t get missed, we’re keeping customers happy and we’re making sure we don’t lose any revenue.
“Next year, we’ll see even more benefits because all I’ll have to do is open WorkPal, select a month, and all the yearly recurring jobs will be there waiting for me to send out to the engineers.”
WOULD YOU RECOMMEND WORKPAL?
“Absolutely, 100%.”
WORKING WITH DB MCLARNON ON WORKPAL
Warren Black, WorkPal Software Development Manager, “It’s been a pleasure partnering with DB McLarnon on this project, they have truly embraced WorkPal, and it’s rewarding to witness how it has streamlined their internal efficiencies and improved their field engineers’ productivity. We look forward to supporting DB McLarnon on the next phase of their WorkPal journey.”
