The quest for consistent excellence
In the last decade of Able Services’ 90-year history, the company experienced tremendous growth, becoming the largest privately-owned provider of janitorial, engineering, and integrated facilities management (IFM) services in the USA. Its workforce of over 17,000 serves a wide range of clients from Corporate Real Estate, medical manufacturers, museums, schools, and sports venues.
Able’s leadership undertook an enterprise-wide initiative to update and consolidate operational processes and programs within a single, integrated cloud-based platform. The goal was to standardize operations and company reporting by improving how its employees do their work every day.
Challenge
- Difficulty harnessing data from increasing numbers of locations, employees, and clients
- Needed to customize and streamline KPI reporting to clients
Solution
- Technology that can collect and organize data from day-to-day operations
- Customized dashboards and reports that keep all stakeholders informed and up to date
- Fast workflow building with Quickbase Automations
- Ecosystem of service partners to provide advanced functionality
Benefits
- Competitive advantage through ability to customize client experience
- Dramatic reductions in time required for critical operational and reporting processes
- Rapid response to customer needs and pain points
Building a streamlined process with Quickbase
Quickbase gave Able Services a flexible platform to quickly build end-to-end process management systems. Branded by the development team as the new “EnAble Platform,” Quickbase allows everyone from front-line hourly workers to C-suite executives to work more efficiently, share information across the organization, make better decisions, deliver consistent high-quality outcomes, and generate more value for customers.
The built-in reporting capabilities of Quickbase mean fresh insights at company headquarters, operations centers, and client sites. Able’s clients can simply log into Quickbase to view personalized dashboards on the EnAble platform with all relevant information from any device.
The Quickbase-powered EnAble Platform also helps drive consistency, transparency, efficiency, and flexibility in the most rigorous environments. For example, by creating a Quickbase app with a master table of standard operating procedures, Able Services can preserve operational consistency, while quickly producing client specific data sets that dovetail to their unique scopes of work, industry/regulation parameters, and information access needs.
Quickbase Pipelines — a built-in Quickbase feature that enables users to automate actions across any number of Quickbase applications — gives Able Services the ability to create complex workflows with just a few clicks.
Quickbase Solution Providers (QSPs) including Data Collaborative, Trinity Integrated Solutions, and Sympo, Inc. provide an “as needed” layer of support for more advanced app functionality and structure support.
Quickbase as a platform for growth
The EnAble solution gives Able Services an advantage over its competitors, most of whom rely on out-of-the-box software to report on the services they provide. The ability to present customized dashboards and metrics to fit a client’s needs help Able Services separate from the pack.
"Heather and I are active participants in every business development
opportunity and sales presentation — from building out a proposal to doing
live demos of the Enable Platform," said Squibb.
Existing clients also value updates to their apps, such as a new dashboard or report; updates can be discussed and delivered all in the same day.
The ability to standardize and automate processes with Quickbase is driving real business value including:
- Using real-time data to spot performance trends before they become a service failure
- Reducing the time to generate specific reports from 1 week to 1 hour
- Eliminating the need for building static presentations due to live interactive dashboards
- Increasing customer value and trust by providing view access to operational KPI’s in real time
