D&N Plumbing (Sydney, Australia)

The endless paperwork that chained Darren Brownlee to his desk is history, now that Sydney based D&N Plumbing uses the SmartTrade job management system.  Like many plumbers, he was frustrated by the amount of time he spent on paperwork and administration – such as processing job sheets, orders and invoices, obtaining current supplier prices, chasing up paperwork from field staff, searching for job information. Particular bug bears included entering the same data several times and field staff spending too much time back in the office dealing with paperwork.

Darren thought that D&N would not be the only plumbers with these sorts of problems. As he was already using a calendar on a PDA, he thought that there must be a solution available with the mobile technology now available.

After seeing an advertisement in Plumbing Connection, Darren investigated and bought SmartTrade, a mobile job management system designed for trade service businesses such as plumbers and electricians. It was up and running in days, rather than weeks. Darren started with the office version of SmartTrade, and has since added the optional mobile application.

SmartTrade now runs D&N’s front end, including customer management, costing, job scheduling, dispatch and invoicing “I can now quickly open a job and assign it to an employee in the integrated calendar. Changing the employee and date and time is as easy as dragging the job in the calendar.”

Darren dispatches jobs wirelessly to his field staff, which are equipped with iMate and Jam PDA's. The guys do their paperwork on the PDA's, including completing job sheets, capturing customer signatures, and updating time sheets. They then return the jobs wirelessly to the office.

SmartTrade allows Darren to import electronic price files from suppliers. “I import price files from Tradelink and Reece Plumbing. It saves me as lot of time and makes sure that I am using current prices when I cost a job.” SmartTrade also interfaces to D&N’s MYOB accounting package, allowing invoices to be created in SmartTrade and then sent to MYOB (SmartTrade also interfaces with QuickBooks).

Darren can now work “on” as opposed to “in” his business. “All my job information is accessible with a few mouse clicks, which means considerable time saving and no lost information.”