HVAC Services Case Study: BTU Group Boosts Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction with MSI’s Service Pro

“We simply could not function effectively without Service Pro. Everything we need to do, it’s able to do.”

Andrew McCracken, BTU Group Director

Since 1964, the BTU Group has been providing full construction services engineering and maintenance in southeastern England. The BTU Group offers comprehensive building services for both commercial and residential properties, such as commercial contracting, residential HVAC installation and maintenance, and swimming pool construction and repair.

With 22 call center staff monitoring 70 engineers in 20,000 buildings and counting, the BTU Group needed to drive service consistency and improve customer satisfaction to bring on additional clients. They decided to transition from their paper-driven workflow to MSI’s Service Pro, a completely electronic, customizable business solution built with field services in mind.

CHALLENGE

By servicing an expanding variety of customers and services, the BTU Group found their outdated, manual processes weren’t able to keep up with each customer’s unique needs. In addition, strict compliance and industry requirements that varied from customer to customer slowed the service delivery process.

“Our customers come to us not only for building maintenance, but also to provide documentation that their buildings are maintained according to government statutes, manufacturing requirements, and industry standards,” says BTU Group director Andrew McCracken. “Since we service thousands of buildings, generating documentation for each individual customer was a job within itself.”

Lack configurable process to generate forms and checklists

Because regulations in the United Kingdom require standard maintenance specification forms, the BTU Group’s staff had to juggle meeting government requirements and staying on track with job completion times.

“With more than 80 different checklists for each asset type, our engineers needed to create a new checklist each time, taking valuable time away from servicing our customers,” McCracken says.

Inefficient, inconsistent service delivery

Depending on which engineer was assigned to the job, the BTU Group found tasks may be completed differently. “Before we had six engineers doing six different tasks,” says McCracken.

This lack of consistency between jobs was frustrating for customers, who expected the same services to be completed at every building every time.

Limited productivity and cash flow with manual tasks

Time-consuming, paper-dependent processes reduced staff productivity, therefore impeding amount of work one engineer can complete in a day.

“With so much paperwork to complete at each job, our engineers were limited in how much they could do, which affected the number of customers we could service,” McCracken says. “To meet our business growth goals, we needed to find a way to streamline our processes.”

SOLUTION

Recognizing the need to switch from paper to the cloud, the BTU Group partnered with MSI to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and grow their business. Now, they manage their entire planned maintenance process within Service Pro, including customers, sites, assets, and standard maintenance schedules.

McCracken says, “We simply could not function effectively without Service Pro. Everything we need to do, it’s able to do.”

Effortless mobile inspection checklist customization

Using Service Pro, the BTU Group’s engineers can generate inspection checklists on-the-fly right from their mobile devices, even without an internet connection.

“A key advantage is for our engineers to create their own checklists very quickly,” says McCracken. “If there’s a new piece of equipment, Service Pro is very adaptable to be able to create required customer evidence for that equipment.” And less time spent creating checklists means more time providing consistent service to even more customers.

Improved service consistency for scheduled and preventive building maintenance

Before implementing Service Pro, the BTU Group found engineers were completing tasks in their own ways. Now, Service Pro enables the use of standard inspection checklists and schedules to ensure service is provided consistently every time, regardless who is assigned to the job.

For scheduled maintenance, the BTU Group simply enters the asset into Service Pro, assigns the appropriate checklist for the asset, and schedules the service at standard frequencies. Then when it comes time to service the asset, the engineer already has the correct checklist to complete the job, so there’s no question as to what needs to be done.

Service Pro helps with preventive maintenance as well. “Now we can readily run reports on failed systems to facilitate responsive service, as well as provide customers accurate daily feedback on the work status,” says McCracken.

One up-to-date, scalable solution

The BTU Group is especially pleased their investment in Service Pro means they won’t have to buy new software anytime soon. MSI implements continuous improvements in the quality and functionality of Service Pro, ensuring the BTU Group’s investment is even more worthwhile.

“We love the idea that we haven’t purchased something that’s out of date within five years,” McCracken says. “With the benefits we’ve gained from Service Pro, we would buy it again.”

“With the benefits we’ve gained from Service Pro, we would buy it again.”

RESULTS

Since implementing Service Pro throughout their organization, the BTU Group has seen huge improvements in evidence collection, engineer productivity, and deployment efficiency.

“We’re really reaping the rewards of going from entirely paper to an electronic system,” McCracken says.

Vastly improved technician efficiency

Having transitioned from paper to digital, the BTU Group has saved significant work hours on shuffling paper that can now be used to service more customers. “Now our engineers work entirely from home and report on job statuses dynamically throughout the day,” says McCracken.

The dynamic scheduling feature allows the BTU Group to reap real efficiency gains as well. For example, if a certain task is outside of an engineer’s skill set, Service Pro makes it easy to deploy another engineer with the right skills to complete the job on time.

Greater customer satisfaction

With adaptable checklists, reporting, and documentation capabilities, Service Pro allows the BTU Group to meet all of their customer needs efficiently. “Service Pro has enabled us to deliver a much-enhanced service to customers,” says McCracken.

Service Pro’s customizable mobile inspection checklists have empowered the BTU Group to provide personalized service to each of their customers. “When customers want something different, we can adapt the checklists to customer requirements very simply,” says McCracken.

With Service Pro’s on-demand reporting capabilities, the BTU Group can give customers accurate daily updates on their projects. They can even run reports to determine if any customer systems are down to facilitate responsive service, sometimes even before the customer knows there’s an issue.

Increased business growth

With all the time and resource savings they’ve experienced using Service Pro, the BTU Group is now looking to grow their business at an even faster rate. Since engineers can complete more work within a day, the BTU Group has been able to acquire more customer references, which has lead to more new customers.

“We’ve just secured some big contracts for about 100 buildings, and another for more than 250 buildings,” McCracken says. All this is in addition to the thousands of buildings they currently service, and the future looks even brighter for the BTU Group.

“We’re now forecasting to increase capacity while becoming more efficient, so we can bring our costs down,” says McCracken. “We couldn’t do this without Service Pro.”

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