The Challenge

Tail Lift UK was established in 2004 to provide repairs and servicing on commercial tail lifts, mobility tail lifts and shutter doors.

The business has built an enviable reputation in the marketplace and now services accounts ranging in size from individual vehicle operators to large-scale fleet operators including many of the UK’s largest retail clients.  We also now service more critical fleet scenarios including several ambulance fleets and other emergency service vehicles.

Their engineers work at both head office and out on the road if breakdowns occur. It is difficult to track service progress using paper-based service reports and their staff sometimes don’t return to head office from one week to the next.

In addition to the time delays that they used to experience, using paper forms to record service tasks was also expensive with the service pads costing in excess of £28 each to print.

Tail Lift UK knew that they needed to look for a smarter reporting method that would allow accurate service reports to be returned by our service engineers in real-time.

The Strategy

iForm Pro™ from Footprint Solutions proved to be an instant hit with our engineers providing an easy to use, paper-free service reporting tool.

The solution was picked up straight away by our engineers partly because it was iPad™ based and really simple to use. The Footprint team reviewed and tweaked our existing forms before developing the iForm Pro™ versions on our behalf. We had assumed that the solution development would take weeks but the form designs were delivered in just 3 days.

Service forms are delivered in seconds to our head office team. The forms also have all engineer-captured photos attached to them automatically which is of real benefit when trying to articulate the condition of fleet kit to a client. As well as the improvement to our service levels, we are also able to invoice our clients more efficiently reducing what was a 12-day lead-time to invoice to the same day.

In addition to the form capture tools, the iForm Pro™ solution also includes a web-based toolkit that can be used to manage form output online. These features allowed job information to be sent directly to our engineers in the field which in turn pre-populated the service sheet with all vehicle and inspection details automatically.

The Result

iForm Pro™ was attractive to us due to the simple system operation and the fact that a trial solution was delivered in less than one week. The forms were dual branded too allowing key customer brands to appear on our forms making our customers feel special.

Our engineers took to the tablet-based forms instantly and this was largely due to the option to hand-write forms using a stylus rather than laboriously having to type service information.

The head office team can invoice the same-day jobs are completed (previously invoiced on day 12) and job sheets no longer have to be scanned or manually typed into the customer account system saving in excess of 8 hours of admin time per service advisor per week.

Tracking engineer progress on each job is now ultra-simple too since the form is returned to head office just before they leave the site.

The system is cost-neutral to run since the administrative efficiencies, removal of print costs and more timely invoice payments all add up to more than compensate for the cost of running iForm Pro™ we anticipate that the iForm Pro™ system will help us win future service contracts due to the environmental drivers to work paper-free.

We are delighted to have teamed up with the Footprint Solutions team and to have adopted iForm Pro™. We are now embarking upon further developments of the solution that will allow our end clients to log into the online form management system to view their own service reports.