In the world of professional cleanup and restoration, jobs are complex and require lots of attention to detail to ensure customer needs are met. For emergency restoration services provider SERVPRO®, the nature of the industry created inefficiencies that crept up across the business.
As a leader in the restoration industry, SERVPRO® services customers in need of emergency cleanups after fires, floods, or other disasters. The job is much more complex than a customer simply calling them up, and having a van sent out to clean up the site. There are insurance companies that need to be dealt with, claims to sort, the storage of belongings while restoration is being done, and other variables that complicate operations.
SERVPRO®’s Team Wilson operates in Texas and Alabama, with locations in Dallas, Houston, and Birmingham. Rather than continuing to live off static spreadsheets, to track job status and customer needs, Team Wilson sought a partner to help streamline operations and deliver critical time-saving benefits. Quickbase’s Dynamic Work Management platform helped deliver on these needs, saving an average of a month’s worth of administrative work for SERVPRO® Team Wilson, gaining real-time visibility into where fragmented data lives.
The challenges of a messy industry
When responding to a call, there is a host of data that SERVPRO® Team Wilson must collect to assess the size and scale of the job. This includes building type, the nature of the disaster that struck, how much property damage has taken place, and information on the insurance provider the customer uses.
Prior to using Quickbase, SERVPRO® Team Wilson logged data in online spreadsheets that quickly spiraled out of control. David Hyde, Director of Technology, Systems Development and Data Analytics at SERVPRO® Team Wilson, says the glut of these static documents were creating inefficiencies and not providing the insights that the team needed.
“We were using a plethora of spreadsheets that would make your head explode,” says Hyde. “With disconnected pivot tables, charts and other data, it was impossible to make clear decisions on next steps.”
With limited automation ability, these spreadsheets began creating instances of Gray Work – or the slow, manual processes used “just to get by” at work – throughout SERVPRO® Team Wilson, with critical information becoming fragmented and hard to access across teams. Different departments also need access to different datasets, making it harder -the claims team needs information on insurance carriers and policy types, the reconstruction crews need to know exactly what the scene looks like before they can plan for how to clean it. Data fragmentation is a key driver of business inefficiency, with new research showing over 50% of enterprises spend over ten hours per week hunting for the data they need to get their jobs done.
The administrative work involved with tracking down essential data became burdensome, with team members losing valuable time trying to find the information they need. The final straw was when Hyde realized how disconnected the system had been.
“Simply put, we had too many people trying to find too much data, and none of that data is in the right place,” says Hyde. “My main goal is operational efficiency, and you just cannot be efficient running a company off of spreadsheets.”
Hyde began his search with SERVPRO® co-owner Brady Wilson for a solution that could provide total visibility and connectivity of applications and systems, unifying all of their datasets under one roof. Enter Quickbase.
Quickbase and Dynamic Work
To test out the efficacy of Quickbase’s Dynamic Work Management platform, Hyde wanted to implement a simple application to help the reconstruction team with workflows. The app’s features include a visual view of workflows in the reconstruction process, and the data each team member needs to complete each step. The data and automated collection proved successful in initial tests, and Hyde says they dove headfirst into Quickbase from there.
“Dashboards changed our lives,” Hyde says. “We were so used to using home pages for each app and system, but they were limited in analytical ability – and hard to align. Dashboards make it so much easier to actually follow the data.”
SERVPRO® Team Wilson continued expanding on this initial test, adding in more workflow functionality to enable users to see their direct impacts on projects. Now, when jobs are being assigned, users can see a visual representation of the workflow’s beginning and end, and where information is being bottlenecked. Hyde sees employee enablement as key to driving use of their Quickbase solution.
“We’re enabling people to become problem solvers here,” Hyde says. “Roles and responsibilities are now clearly defined on each workflow, so each person on the team can find exactly what they need to do in order to complete the job.”
Data automation through Quickbase is also playing a huge role in improving SERVPRO® Team Wilson's operational efficiency. By leveraging AI, reconstruction and mitigation teams no longer had to sift through disorganized and disconnected spreadsheets to piece together their customer’s needs. Data now automatically populates their integrated Gantt charts and other visual data representations on their dashboards.
The automation and streamlining with Quickbase are saving SERVPRO® Team Wilson time in an industry that must race against the clock when emergencies hit.
“Our admin work would be doubled without Quickbase,” Hyde says. “Since our implementation, we’re saving about a month’s worth of work each and every year for Brady and the team here.”
Users of legacy systems may meet new solutions with resistance as they’re being rolled out, but Hyde says it’s up to leadership to demonstrate value. At SERVPRO® Team Wilson, Hyde said that to quell resistance, they did an in-depth overview of their use of it with the reconstruction team, showing exactly how each new element will directly benefit the users. By clearly demonstrating the value, company-wide buy-in and usage of the Quickbase solutions increased.
As they continue its use and deployment, Hyde sees “infinity and beyond” as the potential for Quickbase. SERVPRO® Team Wilson currently runs over 50 Quickbase-built applications in their tech stack, and continue to develop new use cases.
“We are going to keep building this thing until we can’t anymore,” says Hyde. “We are completely rebuilding all of our workflows, flowcharts, roles and responsibilities, and it’s going to be even more incredible than it is now.
“The visibility that we have with Quickbase is like none other. My owners can now have real-time insights into the dealings in their company, which is invaluable,” says Hyde. “Quickbase has changed my life and helped me grow into something I wasn’t before.”
