Featured in Drain Trader Magazine, issue 265. May 2020

Neet Maintenance is a company offering a wide range of trades for building projects, including plastering, tiling, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, landscaping and brickwork. They work with companies like Abby Homes, Linden Homes, and Persimmons, primarily working on new build projects prior to people moving in.
As the company was expanding, they needed to find a better way to manage their workforce and decided to implement Okappy in January 2020. We spoke to Wendy, the Customer Care Administrator for Neet Maintenance, to find out how it’s working for them.

I joined the company at the beginning of January 2020 and the company was operating on a completely paper-based system. They were expanding so we needed to find a system that was compatible with the office and all the guys out in the field. The Office Manager had looked at one or two digital management systems, but they seemed quite complicated.
We do all the new builds and do all the snagging after customers have moved in. It depends on a day-to-day basis how many jobs they give us. We needed a system that could help us handle a sudden influx of jobs. We found Okappy through Google and the system was a lot easier to use. After the free trial, we decided we just needed to implement it!

There are 3 of us in the office, the MD who is out and about all the time, and then we have approximately 30 operatives on site. We mainly use Okappy to manage the maintenance guys who I deal with. We’re taking on even more people in the next few weeks, which will also impact how many people we have on the system.

Due to the amount of extra staff we were taking on, the paper was becoming too hard to handle! We were sending job information back and forth via photos on Whatsapp.  Then when they were finishing, they were doing the same back. With regards to the actual worksheets themselves, we were having to chase the guys to get them to bring them back into the office. We don’t have to do any of that now, because they just upload everything to the system straight away!

It’s got to be a good 2 or 3 hours a day overall. We’re just starting to use it on the invoice side as well, and foresee it saving us a lot more time in the future once we’re more used to it. We’re also saving money on printing and paper costs!

Definitely, unless something drastically changes, we won’t be using anything other than Okappy. We’re very happy with the system, as it’s so user friendly. I don’t consider myself to be someone who’s very good with computers, but if I can use it – it’s got to be good!
We cover Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and are going down to Essex and Hertfordshire. As we’re increasing the workload, the area is increasing! I can see the area we cover growing now we have a more efficient system too.

Just the fact that I can zap all the job information to our workforce straight away! It goes onto their app, and once they’ve completed it, I get everything back again, which enables us to send the photographs and the worksheets back to our clients within 24 hour. Before using Okappy, it could take up to 3 or 4 weeks to send all the information back, depending on when the guys could get back into the office!

Just go for it! It’s like anything – it’s trial and error, but because it’s so user friendly, it doesn’t take you long to get the hang of it. It makes your life easy, especially when you’ve got a mobile workforce, because the ease of getting the information back and forth is really quick!