How Solutions Graffiti increased its productivity by 50% since deploying Praxedo

Can you briefly tell us about your company and its activities?

Solutions Graffiti is a graffiti removal company that was founded in 2003, and that I acquired in 2016. I’m mainly in charge of its sales and operations. We offer complex cleaning solutions that require special products and high performance techniques and equipment.
 
We have two main divisions:

80% of our business requires cleaning up graffiti. Our clientèle for that branch consists of cities, school districts, government ministries, etc., but we also have customers in the housing and private sectors.

The other 20% involves pressure washing for ground markings such as parking spaces and road lines, balconies, tar stains or any other substance that is complicated to remove.

We pride ourselves on our professionalism and our ability to react quickly. Our customers typically receive a bid, have the work done and receive the invoice, all within 24 to 48 hours.

Why did you choose the Praxedo solution? What were you trying to solve?

Before using Praxedo, we were a small team consisting of 3 technicians. They went out every morning with a paper notepad and a little camera to record their work at the site.

They had a map with them and made their own decisions about which customer to visit first, not knowing current traffic conditions, etc. As a result, there was a lot of administrative work at the office, and dealing with the paper documents was a long and cumbersome process.

It was difficult to insert a new service call into a technician’s work day once it had started and we couldn’t add work orders in real time since we were all using paper. The technicians weren’t submitting service reports either.

Praxedo contacted us at just the right moment and presented their offer. We were already looking for a software solution because we had realized that we couldn’t move on to the next stage in our development without a tool to automate our service processes.

We immediately liked Praxedo because of its modularity and ability to be configured to fit our business needs. Not only that, the price was affordable.

Our interactions with the Praxedo teams were a key factor in our decision. Their approach really made the difference. We were quickly put in touch with their experts who listened to what we needed. It was a very positive experience, very different from what you sometimes see with larger software providers, where you have to go through several different people before talking to the one who’s going to actually analyze and understand your needs.

Who uses the Praxedo solution at your company, and for what purpose?

We have a dispatcher who manages the technicians’ schedules based on their geographic location, which can now be accessed in real time with Praxedo.
 
Our teams in the field, team leaders and technicians use the Praxedo mobile app to view work orders on-the-go, carry them out or assign them to themselves.

As part of our process, we have our customers confirm our bids, which then allows us to generate the work orders in Praxedo and schedule them. After the field teams have finished a job, the person in charge of administration at the office enters the work order numbers into our Sage 50 accounting system and sends the final invoice to the customers.

The ability to access the history both on the web and with the mobile app is really helpful in improving our operational efficiency.

What would you say are Praxedo’s main benefits?

Praxedo has given us a major competitive advantage by automating our tasks and providing a real-time view of our technicians’ situations in the field. The solution has given us the ability to react very quickly and provide a highly professional approach – a customer will make a request in the morning, the work is done in the afternoon, and at the end of the day we send the customer their bill.

As head of sales and operations, Praxedo gives me lots of flexibility in organizing my own time. I used to have to go back to the office to print out a work order and change the technicians’ routes. Now, I can create and assign work orders from anywhere and change the entire team’s schedule with just a few clicks in the app. So in that way, and especially during the Covid pandemic, Praxedo makes it easier for me to work remotely and not have to worry.

Praxedo gives us more structure and enables us to communicate more effectively with our customers by setting up automatic text messages and emails and sending work order reports for every job. The efficient service that we’re able to provide thanks to this solution has resulted in lots of positive feedback from our customers. They’re thrilled with our work, and our reputation is growing throughout the greater Montreal area.

Praxedo has enabled us to increase our productivity by 50%, as we’ve doubled the number of work orders we complete on a daily basis. I believe we can improve even further and save more time with the application.

Praxedo has definitely accelerated the growth of our business – our workforce has tripled since 2017. We currently have fifteen employees.

Finally, Praxedo is a very stable solution. We haven’t encountered a single bug since we started using it. That’s a real pleasure compared to other solutions we’ve used in the past. We really appreciate the robustness of this platform, since it means there are never any disruptions to our processes or any loss of information. We’re always confident that we’re working with reliable, centralized information.

How do you see the future of your collaboration with Praxedo?

The future will be all about consolidating Praxedo within our overall IT system.

For one thing, we’re currently working on the technical integration of our Pipedrive CRM tool with Praxedo in order to connect our sales tracking process (bids) and our operations.

The other aspect is that we intend to replace our accounting system and switch to QuickBooks Online. When we get there, it will be easy to set up the connection with Praxedo, thanks to the standard connector that’s included in their product offering.

If you could sum up Praxedo in a few words, what would they be?

Reliability: the stability and robustness of this solution is critical to how we conduct our operations.

Modularity: there are lots of options to adapt the Praxedo solution to our specific business activity, and the process of configuring those options is fast and easy.