CEO's Blog - Lynx’s Maintenance celebrates with BigChange

Lynx are a specialist family-owned building, repair and maintenance company based in Uxbridge.

They offer a fast response and first-class customer service to their ever-growing list of prestigious landlord and management clients, and maintain over 3,000 properties across the south of England.

Founder & Managing Director of Lynx Maintenance, Chris Moseley, relates ‘‘our entire focus is on making service improvements. We recognised that the technology we used was not going to support the level of growth we are experiencing; we had a back office job-management system that was 10 years old, producing so much paper, and a separate vehicle tracking system that we used reactively.’’

Lynx decided that they needed a Big Change. They wanted one system that could manage all aspects of their business, and they wanted a fully-developed, proven product that wouldn’t cost them a fortune.

Chris Moseley went on to say “we were recommended to contact BigChange, who had developed a system that did everything we wanted straight out of the box. BigChange spent time with us ensuring that the implementation process and training of our Head Office and Engineering teams went smoothly.”

The BigChange JobWatch system has everything – built-in service management, customer relationship management, job scheduling, resource time management, health and safety, equipment and stock management, mobile apps, financial features (from quotation to invoicing, with integration to accounting software such as Sage) and vehicle tracking. JobWatch features intuitive reporting, including reporting on customer service and quality, business productivity, driver behaviour and risk management.

Chris recalls how ‘’implementing the system completely did away with paper in the office and in the field. We invoice instantly when a job is completed, and have seen our productivity and service levels hit new heights. This is just the beginning, as we believe that this technology will enable our company to grow without the cost and risk that goes with expansion. We look forward to celebrating 20 years in business next year, and the BigChange JobWatch system has given us exactly the tools we need to progress and grow our family business”.

Martin Port CEO of BigChange commented “We are delighted to have completed another successful implementation of JobWatch with Lynx Maintenance. JobWatch has revolutionised Lynx practices and processes, eliminated all paperwork and time consuming manual tasks. It has even stopped Lynx using the large whiteboard in the main office where they did there two weekly manual planning.”

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

It isn’t fun to have a bad experience with customer service. Sometimes, expectations are not met when you are on the other side of the phone.

Studies show strong customer service pays great dividends to an organization’s long-term stability and growth; many companies employ a customer relationship management system to help keep customers happy.

The benefit of customer service is obtaining customer retention. Happy customers become repeat customers. This means competent, well-trained customer service representatives are needed to handle questions and issues; if the company doesn’t have this it often looks for a cmr solution that will reassure customers that their needs will be met. Representatives who excel at listening to the customer go a long way with the customer’s resolution of an issue. Support desk representatives that strive to help the customer can ultimately lead to better customer satisfaction.

BigChange JobWatch System offers CRM included for free in the web based back office software, combine that with Vehicle Tracking and go paperless with the JobWatch Mobile Android App your customer service levels will hit new heights.

Get in touch now to start making a BigChange for Small Change

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

Change doesn’t have to be hard. JobWatch makes it easy to change the way people work allowing them to streamline all work flows.

And it’s really straightforward to get up and running – sometimes within 24 hours. It’s even possible to test JobWatch before you commit by taking our test drive.
You’ll soon realise the only thing that was hard, was deciding to make automating your processes a priority and eliminating paper.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

A technology firm that helps transport and managed services firms eliminate paperwork has seen 300 per cent sales growth in 2014. BigChange secured 100 new customers in its first full calendar year of trading. It also received 90 repeat orders from existing customers.

Strong Growth for BigChange

The firm now has future contracted revenue of £1.5m, with a sales pipeline of more than £5m.

Its strong performance has continued into 2015, winning an order for almost £500,000 in February.

The business was launched by technology entrepreneur Martin Port in March 2013 and provides technology that allows firms to manage their back office and integrate with tracking and mobile technology.

Mr Port told The Yorkshire Post:

“The customers really appreciate being able to buy three different technologies in one system.”

The business also grew to 30 staff in 2014, from 16 employees at the end of 2013. It hopes to create another 40 to 50 jobs in the next two to three years.

BigChange was founded without bank funding, with private investors contributing £900,000, in addition to £500,000 investment from Mr Port. He said:

“It just shows you if you’ve got a great product and a good service and it’s something different, you can even grow a business without a bank. You have to have the hunger and the know-how to manage that growth. It’s a great year but like all businesses, we’re only as good as our last order. We got some great business in February and we’ve got a really strong pipeline.”

While the business’ growth plan is currently based on UK only, its software is multilingual. The company is hoping to expand into other markets, including the US, in future.

The next 12 months will include a focus on online sales for small and medium-sized business customers, as well as further development.

“We’re developing the product, developing the sales team, always improving our customer service and business intelligence,”

he said.

Mr Port was the founder of Leeds-based vehicle tracking firm Masternaut, which he grew to £22m turnover before exiting in 2011 following a £100m merger with an industry rival.

“I had a lot of success with that business and I hope to make this a much bigger success”

Mr Port added.

This article was taken from The Yorkshire Post article on BigChange.

Speed is a critical factor in all road crashes and casualties.

Speed is a critical factor in all road crashes and casualties. Driving is unpredictable and if something unexpected happens on the road ahead – such as a child stepping out from between parked cars – it is a driver’s speed that will determine whether they can stop in time, and if they can’t stop, how hard they will hit.

Hence reducing and managing traffic speeds is crucial to road safety. It has been estimated that for every 1mph reduction in average speeds, crash rates fall by an average of 5%. Breaking the speed limit or travelling too fast for conditions is recorded (by police at crash scenes) as a contributory factor in more than one in four (28%) fatal crashes in the UK. This is arguably a gross underestimate, because whether or not a vehicle is judged to have been speeding or going too fast for conditions, the fact it was involved in a collision means it was going too fast to have stopped in time. In this way, speed is always a contributory factor, albeit often in combination with other causes: no one was ever killed by a stationary vehicle.

JobWatch powered by BigChange includes for free Driver Behaviour Reporting and Alerting. The system measures Speeding, Acceleration, Harsh Braking, Cornering and MPG. We promote praising safe driving and award our customers with cash donations made on their behalf to “Brake Road Safety Charity” . Well done to Exova PLC for promoting safe driving, Darren Leanning of Exova Grimsby won the BigChange Safe Driving Award last quarter.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

These days the chief finance officer or finance director is under sustained pressure to improve working capital and profitability while minimising bad debt expense.

One way to achieve these goals quickly is by rationalising the order to cash process.

The activities involved in taking customer orders and turning them into revenue can be categorised in four broad areas: sales order processing (which includes order fulfilment and distribution), invoicing, credit management and cash allocation. While critical to the smooth running of any business, all stages of the order to cash process are characterised by time consuming, manual tasks which rely on paper documents and can be prone to human error. This presents a significant opportunity for business process improvement.

By moving from paper to JobWatch introducing greater automation, the finance director can increase speed and efficiency and generate important benefits both for the finance department and the company as a whole. Cash flow, days sales outstanding (DSO) and other key performance indicators are improved. There is also a significant reduction in costs. People and resources are freed up for other tasks, while delivering invoices and other financial documents electronically generates savings from lower print, paper and postage costs.

The benefits also extend to customer retention and revenue protection. Customers are happier and therefore less likely to defect to the competition because they find the company easier to deal with: their orders are processed faster; they are no longer chased for invoices they have already paid and they can receive invoice documents and data electronically, with the additional benefit of being able to upload it directly into their finance systems to eliminate re-keying.

If you want to Significantly Reduce The Number Of Days To Raise An Invoice call BigChange Apps Tel. +44 (0113) 3845800 or email info@bigchange.com also visit www.BigChange.com.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

JobWatch offers a solution for three key markets, the Vehicle Tracking market, the Field Service market and the Transport Management market.

JobWatch is the ONLY system available that can provide all of these features in one easily customisable system to suit almost any organisation with mobile workers.

With the rapid increase in the transportation of man and materials, competitiveness among fleet owners is becoming tougher. The world is moving toward smarter ways of transportation and fleet management for advantages such as smoother traffic flow, improved operation, and enhanced safety. With the increase in global fleet size and the focus on smart and optimized fleet operations, the industry is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.8% from 2013 to 2018. The market is estimated to be $10.91 billion in 2013. Field service management (FSM) software offers organizations a number of benefits, including cost saving, improved employee productivity, and enhanced customer satisfaction. FSM solutions are used for scheduling, allocating, and dispatching technicians for fieldwork. Moreover, they can help in proper scheduling or prioritizing the allotted work, help in matching technician skills, and reduce the problem-solving time. The Global Field Service Management Market to grow at a CAGR of 12.33 percent over the period 2013-2018 and be worth $3.52bn by 2019.

Contact BigChange today to find out more
about the JobWatch System. Either call +44
(0113) 3845777 or email
info@BigChangeApps.com

Martin Port
Founder & CEO