Taking Back Time: How Data Feed Helped Rachel from Ehlerth Electrical

When Rachel Hayes hangs up one hat at Ehlerth Electrical, she quickly picks up another. "We haven't created a position title for me yet because I cover pretty much all bases of the business," she laughs, "I don't think there's a title that covers all the work I do!"

On any given day, Rachel does it all. She's a scheduler, a HR manager, a document controller. She manages the field staff and their needs as well as apprentice training and more. All while trying to keep Ehlerth Electrical running as smoothly as possible.

The Problem: Not enough time

While Rachel loves her work, and all of its workflows and processes, it's the more general workflows like data entry that she feels she could do without.

"They are just so time-consuming," she explains, "I want to be focusing on checking in with my accounts team, or completing pay runs, and too often I get caught behind the desk entering the data for incoming jobs into simPRO."

Being overrun with responsibilities can risk other tasks falling to the wayside when employees aren't careful. If staff lack the time to tend to their own workflows and processes, cracks can start to appear. Issues like errors in data entry, untimely task completion, miscommunication and more.

Rachel had seen these problems pop up in the past and was chasing a solution when she came across Data Feed, simPRO's system for automated data entry.

The Solution: Data Feed

"simPRO was already running our operations at Ehlerth Electrical," Rachel explained, "then, at one of their Roadshows we saw they were also offering the Data Feed tool and I knew we had to get it into the office.”

Data Feed is an integration solution from simPRO that extracts standardised information from emails and compatible attachments, such as business names, addresses, job numbers and site details. It then allocates that information into a simPRO build or uses it to generate new workflows.

"It just makes my life at work quicker," Rachel says, "we use it primarily for the maintenance jobs we receive from our real estate agents and aged care providers. All I have to do is flick their work orders to Data Feed via email and it will put the job into simPRO me."

The Implementation: Getting Data Feed into the business was easy

"A member of simPRO's Customer Success team, Huon, contacted me and explained what information he needed to set up Data Feed," Rachel says, "he asked me to send through copies of the work orders that our customers sent us so he could figure out what data would be pulled by the system."

From there, the Huon set up feeds of information for each of Rachel's customers. He stayed with her throughout the setup process, ensuring it was running smoothly until Rachel understood the system and was ready to use it on her own.

"When work gets so busy, it's just great to have," she says, "it makes it so much easier to get through everything, and get it done so much quicker."

The Results: More time means better-allocated resources

"Having a tool that handles those three to five minutes tasks of data entry for me is amazing," Rachel says, "I would say for every job it saves me about 3 minutes, and in a business where you're getting a consistent influx of jobs every day, that adds up. It saves me a fair few hours of data entry a week."

With Data Feed handling the entry of important job, contact and site information, Rachel has time to spare for her other, more involved workflows and processes.

"Up until recently, those more general tasks around data entry were so time-consuming for me," she explains, "now, however, I've got the space to focus on booking jobs in, catching up with accounts, contacting customers, doing pay runs and more."

Could your business benefit from automated data entry?

If you're interested in learning more about Data Feed, contact us on 0800 622 6376 or request a demo and we'll get in touch!