Using BI to Adapt to Market Forces, Improve Utilization, and Increase Profitability
Smart Care Equipment Solutions is North America’s premier commercial services organization, serving more than 45,000 commercial foodservice operations. With deep technology experience, Smart Care blends excellent customer service with advanced technology to provide commercial kitchen equipment and appliance service, repair, and maintenance.
Limited Visibility into Customers and Labor Utilization
Christopher Buschmann, VP of IT at Smart Care Equipment Solutions, had leveraged data in previous roles and initially engaged Blue Margin to develop reporting that would surface insights on which customers could have the greatest impact on company growth. Smart Care employees were spending four hours per week on this one topic, parsing and pivoting data that provided limited value because it lacked visual trends, KPIs, and actionable insights.
Additionally, impacts from a company reorganization and the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced the need for better insight into labor utilization to maintain and improve margins.
On-Time Insight Through Power BI Dashboards
To improve organizational alignment and accountability, the Blue Margin team developed Power BI dashboards to provide on-time insight into service calls, segmenting demand by geography and service type. This enabled the company to focus resources on trending customer needs and to better coordinate departments around market trends. Other reporting areas included First-Time Fix Metrics, Supply Chain Efficiency, Open Call Aging, Technician Backlog, and Client-Facing Service Metrics.
Prior to this reporting effort, 47 separate Smart Care employees worked periodically to export data from their ERP and develop pivot tables and Excel reports. Now, dashboards are automated and easily available online for all stakeholders. The transition is a straightforward illustration of why designing dashboards for adoption from the start produces fundamentally different results than order-taking report development.
An additional benefit for Smart Care was reducing the ramp-up time for new employees. The limitations of their previous reporting made it difficult to train new hires in their roles and the metrics they were accountable for delivering. What had previously taken one to two years of experience to fully understand could now be covered in a few months. Shared visibility is one of the most underappreciated benefits of a well-built employee performance dashboard: it removes the institutional knowledge barrier that slows new hires and keeps everyone working from the same numbers.
Increased Profits and Labor Utilization
The impact of data intelligence was far-reaching during a year marked by COVID-19 challenges. Buschmann noted that Smart Care was able to adjust the labor and cost structure of the organization to fit changing market dynamics, achieving increased profitability from March through August 2020 even with revenue down 30 to 40%. The dashboard-driven transformation “took [labor] utilization up from 68% to 72%, just by creating visibility and awareness.”
The impact of dashboards on the organization, from executives to technicians, was better alignment on priorities and a stronger sense of shared accountability throughout. As Buschmann put it, the dashboards helped Smart Care “establish their service identity as an organization.” For a comparable example of this pattern at scale, the CoolSys case study shows how the same approach to field-level data visibility drove a 52% reduction in employee turnover across a larger commercial services operation.
If your organization is looking to build the same kind of operational clarity that Smart Care achieved, Blue Margin’s managed data service can develop and maintain the dashboards and data infrastructure that make it possible. Contact our team to talk through where to start.
