The past couple weeks I've been working with an pretty interesting manufacturing prospect. Typically our day to day is helping businesses who, for example, last re-costed their jobs 20 years ago when they first opened their business, or perhaps (and this happens regularly) buy a million dollars worth of stock a year but can only account for half of it.
With this one however, a company that produces hundreds of water tanks per month, approached us wanting a faster method of quoting, producing and delivering the tanks to save cash on lost admin time and modernise their workflow.
When we first spoke, in all honesty, I had no idea of the best way to help deliver the tanks. Typically manufacturing firms we work with work on projects for 6 weeks or 6 months - and I wasn't used to thinking in terms of hundreds or even a thousand projects a month!
Regardless of that...Half a dozen consultation calls, countless coffees and one giant brainstorm with our founders later we put together a plan to achieve what the prospect was chasing.
First things first - We had to create templates to help with the customer's endless quoting, the upside to this was the company manufactured maybe thirty variations of their tanks, all of which could be created as a template to auto fill a quote with one click, a WorkGuru feature a lot of our manufacturing customers lean on heavily.
The next step - Figuring out a way to organise this insane amount of projects, so that they could be narrowed down from 1000 random tanks, to tanks that were destined for a specific area, going on the back of a specific truck and even had a specific drop number from said truck. Rather than suggesting they tell their customers to invest in their own trucks, we used WorkGuru's Custom Fields feature to add area codes, truck numbers and drop numbers as mandatory fields for projects, and once the project reached the dispatch manager he could then filter through the tanks using those fields to choose which ones are sent on what date.
The final step of the process was completing the delivery and getting it signed off, so, on top of the Custom Fields, we dived into our Custom Documents, these handy docs can be set up for a load of different uses from invoicing to quoting and as I found out on this job - they make a cracking Delivery Docket. This customer wanted a physical document to be signed so we created a printable version using their specific custom fields, but, in the future they also have the option of using our Forms functionality to get an eSignature.
Whether I can manage to turn these guys from a prospect into a client over the next few weeks or not remains to be seen, but either way, it was a nice curve ball from our usual projects that allowed me to stretch my legs with some interesting workflows that are different from our every day. It gave me a different insight to the things that you can accomplish with WorkGuru, and will help me think about every other prospect from a slightly different angle.
One of the things that I love about this job, is that our approach is always to work closely with our customers, figure out their pain points and paint them the clearest picture possible of what they can achieve, no matter what they're looking to improve.
If you feel you have a business pain point that you'd like to throw at us as a challenge or even if you just want to modernise and improve your business processes please do get in touch, we genuinely love working with manufacturing businesses all across Australia and helping them squeeze as much profit out of their projects as possible!