Sky5

Headshot of Richard Sheppard

“We were able to identify the jobs that were drifting, look at our pricing, our spend on resources and find ways to be more efficient. We’ve gone from 29% to 33% growth in one department alone and that has netted us $100k.”

Richard Sheppard, Managing Director

icon headquarters

Headquarters

Sydney, NSW, Australia

icon industry

Industry

Multi-Trade, Risk Compliance

icon employees

Employees

90+

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Website

sky5.com.au

The challenges

A team journey to efficiency

Richard Sheppard, Sky5’s Managing Director, discovered Simpro over 13 years ago and after seeing a demonstration he implemented the software into his business and has not looked back.

Over the intervening years, as Simpro’s product offering and technology have innovated, Richard has used resources, like the Learning Toolbox, to keep his team up-to-date on the latest improvements. However, he acknowledges that a recent update of the platform drove his decision to conduct on-site training to induct new staff and update the skills of existing employees.

Sky5 worker harnessed to a pole operating a power tool

“Our staff are really important to me. We have quite a few people that have been with us for 15 years. Our staff turnover is really low but in the last year, we have had a number of new people that had to be trained to use Simpro. There was also some retraining required for some of our more experienced people who had picked up a few ‘bad habits’ after using the software for a long time.”

Persuading his staff to learn and adapt more efficient methods of managing their system was not the only challenge. Balancing the investment in up-skilling his employees to improve efficiency versus redirecting the efforts of their daily work was a consideration.

“As you can imagine, sometimes getting people to change their behavior to learn more efficient methods can feel like pushing and shoving people uphill. However, our biggest challenge has been taking the team away from their day to day tasks and getting them to focus on the training. To create the separation from the operational day-to-day is really difficult because things come up in any business.”

However, the repayment of Richard’s investment has been significant enough to overcome any concerns he had on taking his team off the job to improve their skills in Simpro.

The results

Investment is already paying dividends

“I acknowledge that the investment was large, not just from a monetary perspective but also the investment of time by our team to get all the data ready to move across but the proof is undeniable. My team is using Simpro on a level that I wouldn’t have imagined prior to the updated training.”

“Training has allowed us to become more efficient. From having to maintain Simpro 30-40 hours a week, we can now do small tasks day-to-day that are built into one or several peoples’ roles. We are saving $80k on not having an individual person have to perform all the updates to data and manage the whole system each week.”

Fewer team members and increased efficiency are not the only improvements that Richard can account for with the change. The financial benefit has also been substantial.

“Last year we invested in a re-implementation of Simpro after 12 years and [made] many changes to our set up. We decided to open a new instance and start with a fresh set up, moving all of our old data from the previous instance into the new and moved each department across. But that investment has already paid dividends because we’ve shrunk the management of the administrative tasks down, and it has saved us this year alone, at least $100K.

“It was challenging to work around that while it was happening, but we had the right people and the right support from Simpro to make that move as profitable as it has been for our business.”

Word of advice?

Give your team the time to learn

Sky5 worker in a harness, scaling down the side of a tall building

“I would say to anyone who is looking at implementing Simpro, have a stand-alone team that works with the Simpro implementation consultant directly. The result will be quicker and far more effective. Yes, some parts of your business might suffer while the team’s focus is elsewhere, but I cannot stress this enough. Don’t try and mesh training in with your day-to-day business operations.”

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