Tackling scheduling issues with Caloo

Scheduling installation teams for play and fitness equipment across the UK is certainly no mean feat and when teams are relying on spreadsheets and paper lists, it doesn’t always provide effective results. Here’s how we worked to develop a streamlined process for one our UK based customers:

The Challenge

Abacus Playgrounds (Caloo) are one of the leading play and fitness equipment providers in the UK. The group is made up of a number of brands, from which 11 different installation teams are organised through three branch offices across the UK. The installation teams in particular are key in ensuring that the playground equipment, surfacing and other groundwork projects for customers are completed efficiently.

Historically, the scheduling of the installation teams were managed by the contract managers through spreadsheets, Gannt charts and paper lists, often providing issues as these methods are not easily shareable across teams. With the three branch offices covering all 11 of the installation teams, they were faced with many issues including:

• Ensuring that the teams were scheduled effectively
• Identifying where teams could be re-deployed
• What spaces were available for new bookings and rescheduling appointments

There was little visibility across the organisation and ultimately it became too challenging to set expectations internally and externally and started to impact the direct customer experience.

The Solution

We found that not only was scheduling the resources in this way consuming a large amount of time, the projects also had no direct link back to the opportunity or sales order in their Salesforce system. This resulted in a very significant amount of internal communication to ensure everyone had the right, up to date information.

Following many discussions on issues the customer faced, Coacto devised and built a solution around a Salesforce AppExchange application called Calendar Everything. This provided a structure 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 Takeaways

The entire team can now see the installation schedule, resource availability and they even have access to 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, which was not possible before, preventing any projects which could have been at risk of being missed. 

What’s more is the Caloo teams now feel that they are significantly more effective in their resource utilisation and have reduced the planning effort involved by around 30% – A huge improvement!

Struggling with a similar challenge or need to innovate your Salesforce system to work more effectively for you? Book a FREE consultation here and let’s talk about a solution.

Watch our video below to discover more details on how we helped Caloo overcome their scheduling challenges.