Summary

Catering Equipment Services (CES) Limited is a market leader in commercial cooking, refrigeration, food preparation and warewashing equipment.  With over 40 years’ experience in the sale and service of commercial catering equipment throughout Northern Ireland, it has an unrivalled understanding of the demands of the modern commercial kitchen environment.

As the business grew, CES moved from a paper-based system to WorkPal to improve efficiency, reduce delays and enable real-time communication between service engineers and office teams. This shift has streamlined operations and improved how jobs are managed from start to finish.

Challenge

“As our business has steadily grown over the past 5 years, we found the existing paper-based operating system becoming increasingly cumbersome in terms of both time and cost effectiveness. In short, a job could not progress to parts ordering or invoicing, until our Service Engineers handed in their completed Service Reports to the Customer Services team. The modern business world is moving rapidly towards a just-in-time way of working and CES needed to evolve in order to continue to meet customers’ expectations.”

As CES expanded, reliance on paper slowed down operations. Jobs could not move forward until reports were physically returned to the office, creating delays across key processes.

Solution

CES implemented WorkPal to digitise and centralise job management.

“WorkPal presented the ideal field service software to manage jobs.”

Engineers now submit reports, updates and images directly from site. This data syncs instantly with the office, allowing jobs to progress without delay and keeping teams aligned in real time.

Results

“There are lots of ways WorkPal has benefitted the business, however, the biggest benefit is an improvement in efficiency.  Our Customer Services Helpdesk now operates in real-time with our Service Engineering team in terms of instant syncing of job updates and any responses or follow-up actions required.”

WorkPal has transformed how CES manages day-to-day operations.

Key outcomes include:

“We have removed the inefficiency of the old paper-based system, caused by the hiatus between our Service Engineers completing a job and physically handing the completed Service Report over to our Customer Services Helpdesk.”

In addition, WorkPal has enhanced overall business performance:

  • More professional digital service reports
  • Easy access to documents and technical diagrams
  • Photo capture to confirm completed work
  • Full job history per customer site
  • Built-in vehicle checks and risk assessments

As a result, CES now operates with greater efficiency and professionalism.

Would You Recommend WorkPal?

“CES can confidently recommend WorkPal to other businesses operating with field-based teams who are contemplating moving to a paperless workflow environment. A word of advice would be to spend the time with the WorkPal implementation team to ensure the system properly meets your operational requirements.  One of the big advantages of WorkPal is its reconfigurability – with time suitably invested during the implementation stage, Workpal should be able to capture 90% of your existing business processes.  The remaining 10% is simply down to being open-minded and adaptable to the overall positive changes that WorkPal will present to your business.”

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