Struggling to manage your business on a spreadsheet?

11th June 2015 :: Author: Andrew Cope, Managing Director, Evergreen

The spreadsheet you have been using for ages has been working fine; it does a job for you and maybe there are satellite spreadsheets which plug into the main one. It is working okay most of the time – although it can be a bit unreliable sometimes and maybe the links don’t update but it just about works.  You can get around it though; you know that if you refresh the right link at the right time it will keep going.

I am sure this is a familiar situation and maybe you are going through it now in your business.  What happens when a new person comes in? What happens if you have a new product or a new process? Is the spreadsheet going to be up to the job?  If you have to keep patching and making do, it will only lead to further issues - sooner rather than later.

Total Drainage Services were a good example of a business which used Excel and paper based systems to run their operations and needed help to make their processes scalable, flexible and more robust. This led TDS to speak to Evergreen who worked with them to create a bespoke and flexible Job Management System.

This enabled:

• TDS to create customer records and job lists with the ability to have multiple visits per job.
• TDS engineers to have a mobile remote view for the job so they can add their times on site and any notes.
• Administration to create emails to send to clients and include notes and photographs associated with the job.

With Evergreen’s technical expertise TDS now has a Job Management System that is available to access both in the office and remotely and can be updated in real time.

Claire Martin of TDS initially met with the Evergreen team in 2013 and was impressed with their service from the start - “We were looking for cost effective solutions to administration and job recording in the office. The Evergreen team visited us on site and provided an impressive demonstration of their services”

As Claire confirms “The Evergreen team is helpful, professional and efficient and nothing is too much trouble, they understood our problems and made the solutions sound simple”.

If you would like us to help you improve the way you work or would like to read more about what we did for TDS then please call us or click here for more information.