Challenge
With 60+ staff, scattered through all states of Australia, and into New Zealand, and with this most of their team operating out in the field, Mobile Test'n’Cal are a company that’s literally on the move. So they needed an ERP solution that would manage their entire business from the front line mobile technicians to the back office administration and planning operations.
After using an off-the-shelf solution for a number of years, they had found it couldn’t scale quickly enough, nor did it fit the exact nature of their business — there was always a compromise.
Looking to FileMaker, they knew a custom app could be built that would meet all their needs, as one of their management team had used it in a past role. They recognised from the outset that they needed a solid foundation so it could continue to grow and adapt, so they approached us to look at a completely tailor made solution.
Aim
The aim of the project was to build an ERP application that offered greater efficiency to allow each member of their team to do their jobs. With more efficiency comes the added bonus of being able to give better customer service.
What We Did
As with all our projects, we sat down with them and worked through the requirements in detail. This was no small feat, because when you dig into the details there's an immense amount to understand and capture into the design.
From that discovery work we then 'wireframed' (mockups) a huge number of screens, so André and Jeremy could get a very good sense of what we were to build: it's a critical phase because this is where we take the requirements and turn them into a physical form — albeit a draft of it. It gives everyone a good sense of what the app will look like and how it will work.
After sign-off on the A+D stage, it then took us a number of months to develop the app and get it to a point where it was up and running sufficiently to begin trials and testing. From Mobile Test'n’Cal’s end, the complexity of both their clients and their client’s assets made getting the historic data cleansed and inputted a very large job in itself.
Key features of the solution are:
- Client details, including multiple locations where testing takes place
- Services types that MTC offer i.e. electrical testing, height safety testing etc
- Client asset data, the things that are required to be tested
- Jobs and the schedule of when these jobs/tests need to happen
- Quoting and invoicing
- Reporting
All six of these points interweave meaning it's very hard to start with a small initial solution — this was a big project that deployed with a wide array of capabilities that all had to work together from the outset.
Conclusion
This project hasn't and probably won't ever have a single point of conclusion: that reflects the way businesses grow and change, and as MTC expands and improves, FileMaker affords the flexibility to continue to build on to the app to match their changing needs.
That said MTC have already realised huge benefits:
- Enabling growth by managing client information, sales pipelines and meeting client QMS requirements.
- Gains in efficiency by reducing the costs for technicians onsite.
- Reducing the guesswork by having up-to-date and accurate data.
André and Jeremy keep pushing the boundaries of business, and with that we keep moulding the solution. They are a joy of a client to work with, the perfect fit for a custom solution that can only have been built on FileMaker.
PS: To understand what this business does, they've put together some great videos —
http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0zkG3-hz-RY&feature=emb_logo