Inspections

“As a company we only get one chance to get something right for our customers. Call Collect has helped us to gain better visibility of our activities for both our company and our customers. The fact that we are also saving money into the process is an added bonus”.
                               Steve Ellis, Managing Director, Regency.

The Company
Regency Marquees in Kent is one of the largest marquee suppliers in Southern England. Originally founded in 1984, they have grown rapidly and now employ over 35 staff and supply marquees for events, festivals, weddings and exhibitions. They work with organizations such as Kent County Cricket Club and Canterbury University as well as providing marquees for dozens of weddings each year.

The Challenge
Both Health and Safety and attention to detail are of paramount importance to Regency. The inspection of all work carried is as vital as the delivery of service to their customers. When a marquee is erected a 34 point health and safety questionnaire has to be completed manually by field staff to cover areas such as lighting, food safety, emergency exits, electrical cables, waste disposal and floor finishings. In addition, a separate 8 page form of “extras” has to be completed to ensure that what the customer has ordered they not only get on the day, but the items are subsequently returned to Head office. For example, staff have to check that chairs, candelabras, cutlery, water jugs, place mats, glasses etc have all been delivered out to a site, are then set up for the event and are then all collected at the end of the event and safely returned. Both the Health and Safety form and the “Extras” form were manually completed before, during and after the event. These forms were then manually inputted into the company’s events database the net result was a great deal of time was wasted trying to ascertain what the status of an event was, had it been cleared for Health and Safety and above all the high clerical cost of deciphering the event forms and data inputting.

The Solution
After careful consideration, the decision was made to deploy Call Collect to manage the data capture of the company’s field information. We sat down with Regency and mapped out the complete data-gathering process. Two standard e-forms were then created; one for health and safety and one for “extras”. In addition, the flexible functionality of Call Collect meant that any changes or amendments that needed to be made for a specific event could be quickly and easily effected and deployed to the field team. Once out in the field, a supervisor could call up an event or a location on his hand-held computer and immediately ascertain the status of the event and decide what was needed. In terms of form filling this was now all done on a hand-held computer with instant data transfer, which meant that head-office staff had clear visibility of what was going on at an event often many miles away. Within the second week of deployment, an eagle-eyed head-office employee noticed from a transferred site events e-form report that a wedding was 25 chairs short of what was needed to sit all the guests and was able to rectify the situation and keep the customer happy!

The Benefits

• Inspection and event data reviewed and processed in real time.
• Communication between all staff is greatly improved.
• Data inputting is no longer required at head office saving a vast amount of man hours.
• Filed data errors have been greatly reduced.
• More time freed up means more time to focus on customers
• Training requirements are minimised due to the simple to use software interface.
• Data collection e-forms may be created easily and quickly. This means no expensive bespoke development costs when new data needs to be collected.