Spark Customer Case Study: CoBuilt Waikato

I’m Andy Chisholm from CoBuilt Group. We’re based out at the airport in the Waikato. So CoBuilt represents two companies Insulator, which is a specialist insulation business. We do both residential insulation and also heavily involved in the commercial sector as well.

The second part of the business is pro Interiors, a specialist interior fit out company doing everything from steel studs JB fixing stopping right through the ceilings, acoustic treatments.

Spark came in to resign the mobile business and very quickly presented a couple of other opportunities that we probably didn’t even know existed in the Spark network.

So the opportunity was there, and it’s worked out really well for us with the fleet tracking that provides us with information for RUCs so we can constantly have our road user charges updated.

Secondly, from a customer service point of view, you know, we know where the guys are. So if somebody rang up in the morning and said, “Hey, look, we’re expecting the boys to be here.” We can easily check that and find out where they’re at, or if an urgent job came up again. We can see who’s closest to that job, and then the third piece is the financial piece, and it made sense for us to change.

Not only do we get it on one account, so there’s a consolidation of the account. It worked from a price point of view. We’ve recently introduced two key bits of software, one that sits in the residential space only, a product called Fergus, a locally developed job management software. What that means is that we can load our plans up to the software we can schedule. All of our work and our operations team right through our field team are sharing that information. So when somebody arrives on site, not only do they know where they’re going, they’ve got all of that information. They’ve got marked up plans on their mobile device that they can refer to if needed.

The second piece of software that we’re using, which is a little bit more complicated, is for the Pro Interior side of the business. Buildertrend allows us to tag and all of these subcontractors onto jobs. It provides us with a critical path. If the insulation gets pushed out a week, that will then flow through to the job fixers who know that they’re getting pushed out a week as well. It allows us to track the project from a financial point of view as well. That works really well in real live time, both on site and back at base.

For us I guess it was a little bit riskier was the move away from a current IT provider. The whole process was seamless, to be honest.

And I guess, you know, for a small company who’s probably not focused on technology, some experts have come in and provided a whole bunch of solutions that have made the operation more efficient and a whole heap more productive.