Revolutionising scheduling for a UK based playground manufacturer

Caloo (Abacus Group) are one of the leading play and fitness equipment providers in the UK. The organisation worked hard to schedule and carry out playground equipment installation, surfacing and other groundwork projects for their customers but their systems required urgent innovation.

The Challenge

Scheduling of the installation teams was historically managed by the Abacus contract managers through spreadsheets, Gannt charts and even paper lists. In turn this provided many challenges for when the documents required sharing. 

With installations run out of three branch offices covering 11 teams with 3-4 people in each team, scheduling teams, identifying where teams could be re-deployed, what spaces were available for new bookings and rescheduling appointments proved to be very difficult. With such little visibility across the organisation, it became an issue setting expectations internally and externally.

The Solution

Our certified experts worked with the installation teams to create and build a solution around a Salesforce AppExchange application called Calendar Everything. This provided the structure needed to capture the information required for planning and scheduling, managing resource visibility and availability and to link this with sales, order and invoicing processes already in Salesforce.

The entire team can now see the installation schedule, team and resource availability, with really helpful filters that allow the schedule to be shown by branch, by team and so on. The solution also allows them to see installations that require scheduling preventing any projects which could have been at risk of being missed. 

By linking the schedule to the account, opportunities and sales orders already in Salesforce everyone has visibility which is helping to deliver a better customer experience. Further, the streamlined and systemised process now gives greater control over invoicing, improving cashflow.

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