As home improvement sales go through the roof, the latest improvements to the AdminBase installer management system make reporting as easy as looking at a car dash
Even as foreign travel opens up, many homeowners are, thankfully, deciding that hours spent in stuffy, cramped airport lounges are not the best way to spend their hard-earned holidays. Staycations seem to be the order of the day which of course, is a boon for the home improvement industry and especially installers of windows, doors and conservatories. It’s an extraordinary contrast to March 2020 when we all wondered when we might next be able to walk the streets again, let alone install window and doors. Now the question is: ‘How do we cope?’
The window and door industry is now busier than for at least three decades. And although few installers will complain about the volume of enquiries they continue to receive, finding a balance between servicing those enquiries with quotes against balancing survey/fit/remedial schedules, is now made even more complex by product and materials shortages. And the weather has caused chaos with fitting schedules. It never rains…it really is pouring!
Ab Initio, the people behind the AdminBase installer management system, have come up with some neat fixes that are designed to simplify the management of all key installer functions, and the business overall, by reducing some of them to a glance at a screen. What might form dozens of lines and columns on a spread sheet, are distilled into clean, neat graphics that present key information that may be assessed in the blink of an eye to allow decisions to be made quickly and accurately.
Of all the recent developments made to AdminBase, two key features have been honed with the aim of making control simpler for business owners and senior managers: The AdminBase Dashboard; and the addition of Google Maps.
Although a key part of AdminBase for many years, the Dashboard feature is now inclusive on all web-based versions. Rhonda Ridge, who devised AdminBase when she was managing such processes for a window and door installer, says that although the system performs an incredible number of functions, the focus has been on making status updates, especially, simpler to use: “We call it the AdminBase Dashboard because just like a car, it offers the maximum amount of crucial information quickly and accurately,” explained Rhonda. “We all have an intuitive understanding and awareness of what the colours red, amber and green indicate and users of the AdminBase Dashboard can gain a highly accurate view of as many distinct operations within their organisation as they choose to set up, just by looking at the screen. Green signifies that an operation or function is within allocated parameters; amber denotes that an action is still pending but approaching critical; and red indicates that it is overdue – as simple as that.
“Even looking over the shoulder of an operator, a manager can get an accurate real feel of critical data such as sales pipelines, conversions, surveys booked, fitting schedules, every key function in fact,” added Rhonda, “and it’s incredibly easy to set up preferences.”
Dashboard is enhanced by the inclusion of Google Maps: “Just as you might use a car dash to indicate speed, fuel levels and other key data, we have also included what amounts to SatNav, in AdminBase,” said Rhonda. “It is the Google Maps that we are all familiar with but in AdminBase it is used to provide a clear view of the location of sales-people, surveyors and installers in real-time and for forward appointments. When a call is taken from a potential customer for example, the operator can look at the map, check the address of the enquirer and match it to the nearest sales-person, securing the appointment with the caller still on the line. We can do the same for surveys, fitting and remedials.”
A neat, additional touch shows the type and location of various types of installation. If an enquirer is interested in bi-folds for example, the location of a particularly impressive installation nearby is shown on the screen and arrangements can then be made to show the site off.
“The driving force behind these and other recent changes have been our existing customers,” says Rhonda. “They told us that they needed more information but as they became busier they also needed to make assessments faster than ever before. Dashboard and Google Maps do just that,” she concluded.
For more information go to: https://www.abinitiosoftware.co.uk
ISSUE: JUNE 2021
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