Supernova Award Category
The Problem
We needed to provide advanced analytics and benchmarking information to help our multi-site customers optimize their business and allow them to drive decision-making that affects the bottom line. Customers required scorecards and dashboards that track contractor performance and deliver cost clarity across the entire enterprise. Focusing on our core competency and not building or managing a distributed analytics solution from scratch was a priority along with pulling in an enormous amount of historical data while launching within 90 days. We wanted to reclaim time spent on BI and allow clients to build any report they wish for ad hoc analysis but not manage the data and infrastructure to have more time to invest in growing our business, and educating and empowering our clients. We also wanted to add a new revenue stream and charging for customized analytics would allow for that while also proving our ROI to customers and increasing stickiness.
The Solution
Customers were asking for more advanced real time analytics so they could make immediate decisions to help drive their bottom line, lower costs, meet compliance requirements, and have visibility to more work and customers. We wanted to import many different data sources, including historical data and external data such as weather patterns. Ad hoc reporting was a requirement and the ability to distribute individual and customized reporting out to all of the different stakeholders involved in facilities management, from facilities managers to vendors and contractors. We needed a cloud based solution that allowed us to embed a technology into our existing solution so we could focus on our own core competency. Lastly, we needed to have a solution to offer our clients within 3 months of making our decision and partner with a company with expertise in helping us configure our analytics offering. We partnered with GoodData to build out our custom analytics solution.
The results
Our clients are facility managers responsible for managing from 50 to 15,000 locations. They manage brand upkeep, optimize stores for sales, customer experience, and make decisions regarding repairing versus replacing equipment. Historically, decisions were driven by instinct as access to data was time consuming, complicated, and required specific expertise. Managers spent their time on collection and creating reports and little time analyzing and taking action. Before, we offered services which led to a focus on report creation versus client empowerment. Time was spent managing requests and less time understanding client’s needs and goals. Client adoption of our previous BI tool was lower than 30% as information was not available quickly or easily. We upgraded our BI tool to change the way customers access and consume data. We implemented GoodData so clients are able to access operational, strategic, and tactical reports and have access to rich visual and intuitive dashboards. More than 70% of clients now actively run reports on a weekly basis; a huge jump from the previous adoption. We were able to move almost 200 clients and thousands of service providers to the new platform within 90 days. Our industry has been disrupted and improved through easy access to distributed data. We’ve made the use of data the norm in our industry. Using scorecarding and KPIs in the decision-making process is required by clients and service providers, regardless of size.
Metrics
Analytics helped fuel growth and contributed to the company tripling in size in the past 2 years. 100% of customers have access to distributed analytics and we see more than 70% of our customers are running dashboards on a weekly basis as compared to 30% before we implemented a distributed analytics solution. We were also able to introduce two upgrades that allow clients more functionality to create custom reports/dashboard as well as robust data discovery tools. Around 25% of our customers have already upgraded to the advanced analytics platform with more in process. Our analytics platform has created tremendous value for our clients. According to a case study with DFC Global, they were able to reduce their total Repair & Maintenance spend by 27% and brought down their admin costs by 85% by leveraging ServiceChannel and it’s BI offering. A case study with National Restaurant chain, Ovation brands, shows that they were able to reduce their average invoice cost by 11.8% and saved over $1.7M over a period of 1 year.
The Technology
We partnered with GoodData so we could turn our enormous amount of data into a profit center by distributing customized dashboards and analytics to all stakeholders in our business chain: Contractors, vendors, facilities managers etc. We needed a SaaS vendor allowing us to embed the analytics into our solution so customers could easily get to what they needed. Go live within 3 months was a plus and a partner who could help guide us through their expertise.
Disruptive Factor
We’re transforming and modernizing Facilities Management using BI, automation, and transparency because access to consistent and accurate data was reserved for customers and service providers with resources, driving intuition based decision making. We introduced BI to facility managers and thousands of service providers to drive a culture of data-driven decision making among clients and the industry. We’ve successfully introduced descriptive and diagnostic analytics and prescriptive analytics are coming soon. We’ve been an evangelist for analytics and encouraged the industry to find new ways to enrich facilities repair and maintenance data with weather, foot traffic, sales data, and more and we are now considered a thought leader and have been invited to speak about the future of data in our industry, proving we’ve disrupted the status quo.
Shining Moment
We transitioned platforms and moved 200 clients and 1000s of service providers on Christmas Day with support from GoodData. Analytics is our most popular upsell with 25% of customers opting in, proving we deliver tremendous value to the market. ServiceChannel is considered a thought leader in our space and has been invited to speak about the future of data proving we’ve disrupted the status quo.