Chris Buschmann, VP of IT at Smart Care, having leveraged data in previous roles, engaged Blue Margin (BMI) to drive operational and financial progress. The company faced several critical challenges that were hampering growth and efficiency:
Time-Consuming Manual Reporting His team was spending 4 hours per week parsing and pivoting data that only provided limited insight, lacking visual trends, KPIs, and actionable insights.
Limited Customer Growth Visibility The company needed timely insight into which customers would have the greatest impact on growth, but existing reports couldn’t surface this critical information effectively.
Labor Utilization Challenges Impacts from a reorganization and the COVID-19 pandemic required better insight into labor utilization to maintain (and improve) margins during uncertain times.
Widespread Manual Effort 47 of Smart Care’s employees contributed to exporting data from their ERP, developing pivot tables, and writing Excel reports, creating an unsustainable burden on the organization.
Lengthy Employee Onboarding The limitations of Smart Care’s previous reporting made it difficult for new employees to acclimate to their roles and the metrics they were accountable to deliver, with ramp-up times of 1-2 years.
To improve organizational alignment and accountability, BMI developed comprehensive dashboards that transformed Smart Care’s approach to operational management.
Service Call Intelligence BMI developed dashboards that provided on-time insight into service calls, segmenting demand by geography and service type, enabling the company to focus resources toward trending customer needs and coordinate departments around market trends.
Comprehensive Operational Metrics Other areas addressed included: First-Time Fix Metrics, Supply Chain Efficiency, Open Call Aging, Technician Backlog, and Client-Facing Service Metrics.
Automated Reporting Their key metrics are now automated and centrally viewable by all stakeholders, eliminating the need for 47 employees to manually export, pivot, and report data.
Accelerated Onboarding The dashboard initiative reduced new employee ramp-up time from 1-2 years down to a few months, dramatically improving the ability to scale the workforce.
Organization-Wide Visibility Created centralized dashboards accessible from executives to technicians, establishing shared visibility and accountability throughout the organization.
The impact of data intelligence was far-reaching during a year marked by COVID-19 challenges. The implementation delivered measurable results across multiple dimensions:
Dramatic Utilization Improvement The transformative effect of their dashboards “took [labor] utilization up from 68% to 72%, just by creating visibility and awareness.”
Pandemic Resilience According to Chris Buschmann, “Smart Care was able to adjust the labor and cost structure of the organization to fit changing market dynamics leading to increased profitability from March through August 2020, even with revenue down 30-40%.”
Enhanced Organizational Alignment The impact of dashboards on the organization, from executives to technicians, is better alignment on priorities and a stronger sense of shared accountability throughout.
Service Identity Establishment As Buschmann puts it, these dashboards are helping Smart Care “establish their service identity as an organization.”
Reduced Manual Effort Eliminated 4 hours per week of manual data parsing and the involvement of 47 employees in report creation, freeing resources for higher-value activities.
Faster Employee Productivity New employees now reach full productivity in months rather than 1-2 years, dramatically improving the company’s ability to scale operations.
By partnering with Blue Margin, Smart Care Equipment Solutions transformed their operations during one of the most challenging periods in recent history. The success of this project demonstrates:
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