Overview

Company: Australian Beverage Corporation
Industry Type: Wholesale Distributor (Food & Beverage Equipment)

About Australian Beverage Corporation

Australian Beverage Corporation is the leading distributor of several global coffee equipment brands and provides tailored coffee solutions and national service.

Australian Beverage Corporation represents Australia’s global leader in fully automatic coffee machines, with 90% of its business focused on coffee systems. After using NetSuite for a long time, ABC had reached the limits of native NetSuite functionality and needed to extend the NetSuite platform with a field service management tool.

Business Challenges

• Service was a combination of paper and electronic-based systems. These systems did not integrate, impacting revenue and end-to-end job completion.
• Scheduling was done via an electronic calendar not linked to real-time job completion, so it was difficult to know whether jobs were completed.
• Recording work done and spare parts consumed on jobs relied on techs in the field adding to their sheets, so if parts were not adequately recorded, customers were not billed.
• Processing jobs was very time-consuming and data-entry intensive.
• Quality of paperwork impacted overall data integrity.
• The existing script for serialized tracking was a barrier to adopting new bolt-on functionalities.

“Next Service has been the best thing we’ve implemented in Service to date. It’s simple, quick and user-friendly.” Geoff, Lead Technician

 

Why did you choose Next Service?

During the evaluation, ABC found Next Service a polished product, well-rated and well-regarded with good reviews. ABC felt their business aligned with the software’s creators, with the Next Service product originally designed to enhance technician capabilities and client case management for a similar high-value German equipment business. Therefore, the partnership with Next Technik seemed like a perfectly functional and cultural match.

The Scheduler was a big plus and very user-friendly, leagues ahead of the other applications they evaluated. It was also crucial for ABC to have a local implementation out of Australia, within the same time zone, for ease of intensive development and ongoing support. Critically, Next Technik had the smarts and professional goodwill to work with our existing scripting, which enabled our business continuity and maintenance of historical accuracy across all our serial tracking.

“Next Service has been a game changer for our service business. It has given us the visibility and control to bring the next level of value and ease-of-use to both our clients and our technicians. Working with Next Technik team has been a pleasure. Their level of technical skill, business know-how and responsiveness to our needs for customisation, as well as maintaining their industry edge with platform improvements, continues to delight our team and exceed our expectations.” Christophe, General Manager

Business Impact

• Multiple disparate electronic and paper-based systems are now integrated into a single, seamless cloud-based system on NetSuite.
• Jobs needing additional admin to solve data issues have gone from 90% to 10%.
• Having maintenance agreements pre-planned in NetSuite has made it easier to keep on top of jobs, particularly for large projects.
• For technicians, performance dramatically improved by displaying comprehensive customer information, historical work done on machines, simplified information, and image capture. The interface is beautiful, easy to use, and compatible with any mobile device they prefer to choose.
• For customers, the balance of breakdown repairs has shifted more towards scheduled maintenance since implementing Next Service, with more time to focus on proactive jobs rather than reactive ones. This results in smoother, continuous operations for their sites. 
• For the management team, accurate reporting – particularly Next Service Profitability Reporting – by combining collected field service data with relevant sales and case data helps us get precise visibility to refine pricing and returns and re-evaluate KPIs for both technicians and sales teams.
  

“Next Service has made my job immeasurably easier.” Amanda, Service & Special Projects Coordinator  

Specific Gains

Time Efficiencies

• Scheduling now takes a fraction of the time with the drag-and-drop schedule board.
• 60% improvement in getting invoices out and receiving payment for jobs in a timelier manner – jobs are invoiced within a week versus 2-3 weeks due to delays in paperwork.
• Time is more than halved to process jobs. This used to take 5-10 minutes per job – with Next Service this has been reduced to 1-2 minutes to check and click a button to create an invoice (more than half).
• Time more than halved for technicians with not having to write out paper job sheets.
• Time more than halved in spare parts dispatch for technicians on scheduled works.

Data Accuracy

• All service jobs are now in real-time across our entire network – what we see is what we get, now all at-a-glance on the scheduler.
• Much better control and visibility over spare parts used and serialized item traceability (e.g., spare parts and equipment codes commonly have 12 digits, if one number was written down wrong, technicians and admin would be guessing which one it was!).
• Inventory adjustments due to incorrect or missed entries dramatically improved.

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