Hi, I’m Frank Steinocher from Shumate Mechanical. I’m the Chief Information Officer (CIO). We are a HVAC, LEED-certified company based in Duluth, GA.
Field service has a number of operations going on and there’s been a number of improvements over the years: From the number two pencil, to the alpha pager, to radios—and then NexTraq GPS.
Shumate’s service area is pretty much from Tennessee and Alabama to the Carolinas. We have 200 vehicles, we have 100 service technicians, and about 75 installers. Trying to schedule that within the boundaries of the state lines efficiently with the traffic in Atlanta is a challenge.
Field service is 24/7, so on a busy July day like today we have people coming in at 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. We have warehouse people coming in completing the staging for the day’s work. We stage the night before for all the jobs on the residential side to be ready for the crews to fill their trucks to be able to leave before Atlanta traffic starts.
Right now labor, as everyone knows, is a tough commodity. And that’s why utilizing NexTraq, and utilizing telematics, and utilizing the tool sets that you have available to make yourself more efficient and build your capacity with the least amount of people is very important to us.
We have certain metrics that we run our business with. You have to understand the metrics. But managers can manage much more efficiently when it’s not your opinion anymore—it’s a metric that supports your opinion. And then that goes a long way toward improving your results.
The business owner has to have the metrics in their mind what they want to track. NexTraq make the data available.
I think a month after we had NexTraq we saved immediately in cost savings on applied time, payroll, capacity, we were able to take more calls. People were where they were supposed to be.
Right off the bat we were able to cost justify the solution.
Why NexTraq? Customer service. Capability of the network. Agility of their team. Those are the three main components I look for from a vendor—a partner.