At Irwin M&E, producing the monthly Service Management report used to take six hours. Thanks to Summit Business Analytics, it now takes just five minutes.
RedSky customer Irwin M&E provides a full range of Mechanical, Electrical and Facilities Management services to clients in the public and private sectors throughout the UK and Ireland.
In recent months, RedSky’s flagship Summit Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has transformed Irwin M&E’s approach to reactive maintenance. Everyone involved in reactive maintenance now accesses the system, including the engineers who input data on the Summit Service Management mobile app on-site, and the helpdesk team who assign and track the progress of jobs.
IT Analyst Kevin Willis said: “What we have noticed is that jobs aren’t remaining open for anywhere near as long as they used to, and none are getting missed.”
A more efficient approach
Kevin has set up a full suite of tailored reports that give individual users immediate access to the real-time information they need to do their specific job. It’s a much more efficient approach and reports are now produced at the mere touch of a button
“The Operations Director and the Managing Director used to block out a full day for the monthly meeting with the Contract Managers, who would all turn up with loads of paperwork and Excel spreadsheets,” said Kevin. “It would take up to seven hours to go through all the documentation with each Contract Manager, job by job, trying to figure out exactly what stage each project was at. But now the meetings start at 8.30 am and are done and dusted by 11 am.

“What has changed is that all the discussions are now based around key tiles on the Summit dashboards – particularly the ‘overdue jobs’ tile. The Directors and Contract Managers click on the tile on their laptop or tablet and then drill down into individual jobs on that list, to find out the history of the job, the last labour, the materials used and perhaps a reason why the internal target has been missed. All this can be done in just two clicks.”
At the click of a button
Irwin’s Service Manager is achieving similar time savings. “He used to spend nearly a whole day poring over spreadsheets on a job-by-job basis to prepare the detailed monthly contract reports that a number of our clients require,” said Kevin. “But now he simply clicks a button to generate a full Contacts Response Report. He then exports it to Excel and emails it to the client. A task that used to take six hours can now be done in five minutes because the data’s all there.”

Things have become far less chaotic on the reactive maintenance front. “There were always a couple of stressful incidents each day, where staff were chasing down paperwork and jobs,” said Kevin. “We just look back and laugh… we don’t work that way anymore. It’s all on the system now: every service report and every bit of data, and all our numbers are updated every five minutes. What more could you want?”
Based on the success achieved on the reactive maintenance side of the business, Kevin has just gone live with Summit on Irwin’s planned maintenance works. We’ll be reporting on progress in a few months’ time…
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