Take advantage of today’s electronic data options, and enjoy greater efficiency — or even better revenues
Two years ago Mitchell Property Services was buried under an avalanche of paperwork. The firm provides landscape maintenance and snow/ice removal for commercial establishments in the Millbank, Ont. area. “We’d have 25 guys handing in their work tickets for each customer at the end of their shift and we’d end up with a milk crate full of tickets — not in order,” recalls owner Jeff Mitchell. “At invoicing time we’d lay the tickets out on every table, desk and countertop. Then sort them by customer. We’d finally get them all in their piles, then go through every pile and put them in order of date. When that was done we’d tally the customers’ bills and go to the computer and prepare the invoices. It was a super-long process and we really needed a quicker way.”
Mitchell found that quicker way in a computerized business management application driven by wireless Palm hand-held devices. The system includes Palms for Mitchell’s field crew, software and a desktop component to accept data from the Palms and process it into the firm’s computer. Now invoices are prepared and printed in the blink of an eye, “complete with all the details we need on file and that our customers want to see,” he says.
Developed by MDKS Business Solutions, of Waterloo, Ont., Mitchell’s system (called Maintain IT) was tailored to address landscapers’ summer and winter work. For snow and ice clearing, the Palms record such property-specific information as arrival and departure times, weather and pavement conditions, the type of work done, amounts of salt applied, along with any issues or obstacles the crew encounters on the property. Cautionary pop-up notes appear for each property, letting the crew know a customer’s special instructions or preferences before they begin the work. The devices are also loaded with aerial maps of each site with work areas marked off.
In addition to property details, the Palms can record employee activities from mandatory vehicle safety checks to washing the trucks. Mitchell uses the devices as time clocks. “The Palms begin tracking time from the moment they are turned on and if there is time missing, their pay cheques will be affected. So you can bet the crew is motivated to switch them on as fast as they can and tell it they’re doing something!” he grins.
At the end of a shift the crew members hand in their Palms and the data is downloaded into the firm’s invoicing software. The process takes a few seconds per device. Billing for services and materials is instantly calculated for each customer according to Mitchell’s pre-set instructions. “For example, we have a three-hour service minimum and a four-bag salt minimum. So if the crew entered in two hours our software will bill for three hours. If he entered three bags of salt, the software bills for four bags.”
According to MDKS literature, the system can interface with various accounting softwares. Vehicle safety check completions are downloaded into a desktop folder for later archiving or inspection by the Ministry of Transport, if required. The system can also create reports by customer, by employee or by equipment for any period. “This makes it useful for tracking costs,” adds Mitchell. “We can see averages, trends and other data that helps us set the right pricing for contract renewals.”
From cell cameras to GPS
If the landscape trades have been slow to retire from the paper chase, Mitchell’s company and others suggest this has begun to change. Carmine Filice, of Greentario Landscaping in Hamilton, Ont., says foremen now use cell phone cameras to photograph unusual occurrences on work sites. “They e-mail the photos to our secretary or upload them directly to the company computer,” Filice explains.
At Humphries Landscape Services in Oshawa, Ont., hand-written work logs are scanned and retained digitally for easier reference and storage, according to owner Mark Humphries. Even information from the crew’s Blackberries gets downloaded regularly into the firm’s computer. “Blackberries contain a wealth of valuable information including contacts and calendars,” he adds.
More contractors are also using global positioning systems (GPS) these days to track their equipment and acquire third party verification for various types of activities, such as salting. Mitchell’s Palm-driven system does not provide this verification, “but when I want to confirm the location of a truck on a certain day and time I go back to the guy’s Palm and compare it with the GPS report,” he explains.
According to Bob Farrell, president of the Mississauga, Ont.-based PinPoint GPS Solutions, several improvements can make record-keeping easier. “We have strengthened the ability to take data from GPS tracking and export it directly into other systems such as job costing and payroll,” he says. “Input from sensors that monitor salters can now more clearly relate the start/stop/duration of salt runs to a specific customer’s site. Previously the system’s produced reports did not show customer site names.”
PinPoint has also simplified zone creation, Farrell adds. “Previously, it was necessary for our customers to manually draw each of their customers’ property borders on the maps in our GPS systems. If they had a large number of customers, or if they experienced churn in their customer base, the upkeep of the geo-fences often lagged behind the work that was being done in the field. Now they can simply list their site addresses on an Excel spreadsheet, updating the addresses as needed, and import this list into our system. The system reads the lists and automatically draws the zones.”
Who’s in control?
Regardless of the hardware or software in question, Toronto attorney Robert Kennaley warns that from a risk-management perspective, you need to be able to prove that you met your contractual obligations and performed your due diligence. The use of digital records is “an issue the courts grapple with,” he adds. “I’m not going to tell you that the courts have determined an approach that applies in all cases, because in fact every circumstance will be decided on its own merit.”
Since digital records must be proven like any other kind of record, “the focus needs to be on the operator,” Kennaley says. “Who’s controlling the process? What you have to be able to do is put somebody in the witness box who can prove the document by saying, ‘Yeah, I put this record together. This is the software I used. This is the information I fed into the software. This is what happened when I hit print. And this is the document.’ So you’re proving the document that way,” he explains.
One way to keep control over the process is to limit who can access your central computer. Says Mark Humphries, “Where our Blackberries are concerned, there is one person in my office (with others available due to cross-training) to maintain all our electronic gadgets and download information into our principal hard drive.”
Mitchell’s Palm-driven system alerts his central computer if the data on any of the devices is changed or deleted. The system also ensures thoroughness of log entries by walking the crew though a list of queries for each property. “They can’t miss a query because the Palm won’t let them leave the screen until they answer it,” Mitchell explains. They also cannot forget to hand the Palm in at the end of a shift, the way they sometimes did with paper tickets. Adds Mitchell, “At the end of the year when we’d be cleaning out our employees’ trucks, we’d find all these tickets under the seats and I’d think, how much revenue did I lose this year?”
Susan Hirshorn is a Montreal-based writer, editor and
communications consultant.
