Managed.IT - issue 52

MANAGED.IT 27 We acquired Tegile and we have our own Activescale organisation selling multi- petabyte object storage systems MOBILE WORKING www.managedITmag.co.uk Greater productivity and faster invoicing are just two of the benefits of a paperless mobile working solution implemented by CleanSafe No more paper, no more data entry, fewer customer queries and quicker invoicing Emergency clean-up company CleanSafe has transformed its business with an end-to-end cloud-based management system that combines back office management, customer service and accounting functions with live fleet monitoring and mobile working apps. Headquartered in Surrey and with regional offices in Cannock, Manchester and Livingston, CleanSafe provides a 24/7, two-hour response emergency cleaning and restoration service delivered using a paperless mobile workforce and job management solution from BigChange. This streamlines the entire business process, from the initial customer call and job allocation to the digital capture of customer signatures and invoicing. Calls are handled within a CRM application, which links to a job scheduler and route planner. This sends details about allocated jobs to 70 field technicians equipped with Samsung tablets running End-to-end efficiency JobWatch mobile working apps covering safety, job management and reporting. In addition, all CleanSafe vans are fitted with BigChange satellite tracking, providing real- time location monitoring to keep customer services updated on the progress of each job and driver monitoring to encourage safer driving. Caroline Bigg, Finance Director at CleanSafe, said: “With BigChange we are completely paperless. It is a true end-to- end solution with everything completely integrated and that is tremendously beneficial as it means we can work fast and efficiently. No more paper, no more data entry, fewer customer queries and quicker invoicing. We reckon BigChange saves up to two hours a day that we previously spent trying to sort out the day’s work and administration. That probably equates to an extra job a day for a number of our operatives.” Bigg estimates the financial benefit of this greater productivity to be worth as much as £1 million annually. CleanSafe Managing Director Steve Broughton added: “The combination of tracking data, customer signature capture and before and after photographs means we have irrefutable evidence of every job completed. With the paperless, real time reporting, we can invoice immediately and customers know what they will be invoiced. From my perspective, the biggest benefit of BigChange is simply that it allows us to invoice correctly and quickly and that means we get paid on time. It’s good for business.” Previously, with their paper- based system it used to take CleanSafe up to a week to raise invoices.  Now with real-time, accurate reporting from technicians at the end of a job, invoices can be raised within 24 hours. www.bigchangeapps.com we are seeing massive adoption of flash technology either embedded into those devices or added via a microSD slot. That embedded space is a huge area of growth.” Total storage solutions Edwards points out that three or four years ago, Western Digital responded to some of these trends by re-positioning itself as a provider of total storage solutions. “We initially released some JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and JBOF (just a bunch of flash) products – dumb devices, large dense boxes of storage. Over the last few years, we have introduced some really revolutionary JBOD and JBOF products that have gained a lot of success across the globe, and we have continued to progress, releasing storage servers that actually compute. We acquired Tegile and we have our own Activescale organisation selling multi-petabyte object storage systems. We’ve really started to move into fully functioning storage subsystems, rather than just selling components, and that’s an area where we expect to see significant revenue growth over the next 5-10 years,” he said. Not that there won’t be challenges along the way. As Edwards explains, some of these are simply a product of Western Digital’s market dominance, especially in HDD. “In the HDD space, there are really only three players. Seagate and ourselves each have around 40% share and Toshiba has the remaining 20%. So, if someone is buying an HDD, there’s a pretty good chance it will be one of our products. However, there are many more players in the SSD space. You’ve got Intel, you’ve got Samsung, you’ve got Hynex, you’ve got Toshiba, you’ve got Kingston – it’s a much more competitive landscape. One of the challenges we’ve got to be very aware of is that as that business converts from HDD to flash, which we are beginning to see especially in the desktop and client businesses, we must make sure it’s a Western Digital SSD product that’s replaced in those systems, otherwise we run the risk of our revenues decreasing,” he said. “We have such a large share of the hard drive industry in certain markets – in surveillance, we have over 70% market share across the region; in NAS drives, we have over 60% market share across the region – and as some of those markets transition to flash, as they will, we have got a massive task to make people understand that Western Digital is also their ‘go to choice’ on the flash side, which people probably associate more with Samsung and Intel today.” Whatever the challenges Western Digital Corporation faces in the future, it can also look forward to great opportunities as it expands into new markets and establishes itself as a leading brand and name to be trusted. www.westerndigital.com