SUCCESS STORY

How WorkBuddy powered First Choice Fencing to enhance visibility across all business units

1 %
Improvement

Employee productivity

1 %
Faster

job processing

1 %
Reduction

Administration

First Choice Fencing logo

The Story of First Choice Fencing

First Choice Fencing Pty Ltd was established in 2003 to provide reliable and competitively priced options for fabrication and fencing related products in the residential, commercial, civil, and maintenance sectors. Their scope of works includes construction, renovation, consulting, architecture, and electrical services. Since its inception as a fencing company, the business has grown substantially to an organisation with subsidiary companies in metal works and fabrication trades.

Subsidiaries

Industry

Construction Fencing

With WorkBuddy

Since 2006

Business Size

Medium

Challenge

Multi-company access and automated tracking

First Choice Fencing runs a complex business with multiple subsidiaries and needed to retire its old paper-based system. They were looking for a cloud-based, integrated job management solution to enter and track all their data in a central location. WorkBuddy’s cloud backups ensure their data was protected, even in case of natural disaster. All subsidiaries required their own business unit within the account, sharing access to jobs, clients, suppliers, and inventory. This was essential to automate their processes to track all jobs, projects, employee time, job safety, and activities; with a system flexible and powerful enough to grow with their business.

“We love that WorkBuddy is so robust and flexible. WorkBuddy is always open to customer feedback and keeping the product great at managing my jobs.”

First Choice Fencing

SOLUTION

Separate companies, united by one system

As a multi-company business with four separate subsidiaries under one banner, First Choice Fencing needed the option to view all their data in one place. By utilising the multi-company management features in WorkBuddy, they can:

  • Manage multiple business entities without the need for separate logins.
  • Share job information between business entities.
  • Filter information related to an individual company.
  • Run reports on an individual business entity or the group of businesses as a whole.

 

Multi-company features also assist First Choice Fencing with:

WorkBuddy made it easy for First Choice fencing to grant or restrict user access. We set up user permission groups based on employee roles or responsibilities to limit the visibility of those users to specific areas and fields in WorkBuddy.

Allows the company to share assets across multiple business units and easily manage maintenance schedules with powerful employee allocation and runsheet tools.

Business reporting makes it easy to run operational or financial reports on each business unit, promoting full transparency across the company.

It’s now easy for First Choice Fencing to create, complete and track work orders. The WorkBuddy operations board provides a full view of employee workload where they can drag and drop jobs into their schedules, and assign users to a job. They can also send alerts to employees by email or mobile notification when a work order is triggered that belongs to them.

The goal was to get rid of spreadsheets, handwritten notes and forms and have one system to store all company data. WorkBuddy provided one system to keep all essential job records and data of the businesses under the First Choice Fencing banner. They can also copy across their inventory, clients and suppliers across to any business unit.

A cloud-based time-tracking system to quickly enter time on any job

Time tracking was the most important priority for First Choice Fencing. They wanted to view employee locations and track the time spent on jobs. Employees needed to easily clock on and off a job onsite and receive an accurate record of hours worked. First Choice fencing can keep employees on track with performance tracking, enabling their employees to take ownership of their own productivity, work and schedules. With WorkBuddy, First Choice Fencing can run reports that detail employee performance and productivity. Timesheets also enable them to:

Reduced risk and improved job safety

First Choice Fencing needed compliance controls to help ensure all employees met contractual and WHS requirements when completing a job. They needed to track employee certificates, insurance, police checks, induction evidence, and trade licences. 

THE RESULTS

Reduced administration effort, increased profits

The transformation from an old paper-based system into the latest cloud-based job management software was a massive benefit for the entire company. WorkBuddy helped First Choice Fencing and its subsidiaries to share jobs, clients, suppliers and inventory across all the business units. WorkBuddy deployed powerful multi-business features that allow them to manage assets, user permissions, reporting, and enhanced communications. First Choice Fencing now enjoys:
  • Faster timesheet completion
  • Enhanced visibility across all business units
  • Improved employee productivity
  • Increased invoicing turnaround
  • More billable hours
  • Increased overall revenue

“The team at WorkBuddy made it so easy to implement and use the platform. We now have greater visibility and control over our operations, with our business on the path to growth.

First Choice Fencing

Do you want to see the same results in your business?

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