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“I’d recommend Okappy if you want a streamlined service desk and the ability to reschedule jobs easily.”
Cherelle Mottram, Office Manager at C&R Building Solutions

C&R Building Solutions looks after more than 100,000 properties on behalf of its clients throughout Hertfordshire, Essex, London and the surrounding areas. Established in 2016, the company specialises in roofing, groundworks and building services to provide a comprehensive maintenance service, including responsive repairs, scaffolding, all types of ground works and more than 1,500 roofing repairs per month. With an impressive first-time fix rate, the company includes Peabody, Enfield Council and Genesis Housing amongst its clients.

With such an extensive number of properties and jobs to schedule each month, C&R Building Solutions realised it needed a better way to manage its field service operations. In the office, the team of planners had been using Microsoft Outlook calendars to book and schedule jobs for the field service engineers.

Cherelle Mottram, Office Manager at C&R Building Solutions, recalls, “We were expanding our workload and our workforce, so the existing solution just wasn’t suitable anymore.”

C&R Building Solutions began to look for a more suitable field service management system. As part of the search, the team encountered Okappy. “When we saw Okappy, we realised it was user friendly and reasonably priced,” says Cherelle. “Okappy was just what we were looking for.”

Okappy is a cloud-based field service management solution, so the team could begin using it straightaway. Cherelle says, “Okappy is very user friendly and easy to train people on.”

The office-based team now uses Okappy on their desktop PCs and laptops to book client jobs. The field service engineers can access all the relevant information in Okappy via their mobile devices.

Daniel Solazzo, Contracts Administrator, uses Okappy on a daily basis. He states, “Okappy is an essential piece of office kit now. At the start of the day, we check Okappy to make sure that our field service operatives are checked in as ‘on site’. Then, throughout the day, we can easily track progress and answer client enquiries thanks to the up-to-date information the engineers share in Okappy.”

This has streamlined effort for the administration team, since they no longer need to make calls to check on job progress or engineer locations. At the same time, as they complete the work, the field service engineers add details about the work carried out and upload photos as evidence to Okappy.

“It makes it a lot easier for us to create reports for our clients,” says Daniel. “Each day, we create a report for each of the jobs that have been completed the previous day. We send these reports to the relevant client. This used to take around ten to fifteen minutes per report. Now, with Okappy, it takes just a couple of clicks and the report is produced. We check the details and the report can be saved and sent to the client immediately. Okappy saves us a lot of time.”

Each member of C&R Building Solution’s team of five planners typically deals with four to six jobs per day. The time savings the team has achieved when producing client reports through its use of Okappy adds up to around twenty hours per week or more than 1,000 admin hours per year. This time can now be used for more productive tasks and to support the continued growth of the company.

Okappy has also helped the planners to optimise the way they book jobs. It is now much easier to see in which areas operatives are working and schedule work accordingly, helping to reduce travel time and costs as well as carbon footprint.

“Okappy is very flexible and straight-forward to use,” says Daniel. “And the support we receive from Okappy is excellent too. They’ve been brilliant. They listen to their customers and resolve any issues very quickly.”

Cherelle adds, “I’m really pleased with Okappy. It has streamlined our way of working. I’d recommend Okappy if you want a streamlined service desk and the ability to reschedule jobs easily.”