How Joblogic Became Essential for Thermatic’s Rapid Growth

For rapidly growing UK FM company Thermatic, having a cloud-based field services management system is not just a nice-to-have – it’s critical.

Thermatic provide full national engineering services to some of the UK’s largest retailers. Managing over 140 remote engineers, across a multitude of trades and skills. Managing scheduling and travel on an hourly basis is critical to both the business efficiency and their customer service.

Seeing their growth over the previous few years, Dean Purcell, Commercial Finance Manager at Thermatic, wanted to ensure there was resilience within their field management software to continue to manage their demands. In 2019, the decision was made to replace the Protean field management system and adopt its rival system – Joblogic.

This was a sizeable risk for the new Commercial Finance Manager – so why take it?

“We spent a great deal of time looking at what platforms were available on the market, challenging capability and ‘does it actually do what it says on the tin - effective communication with our engineers in the field is absolutely critical for us.”

“One of the biggest advantages of the Joblogic system was its cloud-based capability. As you can imagine, this proved extremely useful throughout COVID-19, allowing us to be more flexible with working locations for our office-based team and also maintain a high level of communication with our engineers – there were also further efficiencies made with regards to collection and storage of data, such as engineers reports and asset data.”

Software helping leverage rapid growth

Thermatic was established in 1971 and has since then built an enviable reputation in the FM sector, providing planned and reactive servicing, maintenance, and compliance services, focusing on Hard Facilities Management throughout the UK and Ireland.

In recent years its growth has accelerated considerably, both organically and via acquisitions. Now employing over 200 people – of which some 140 are field service engineers, much of the company’s success in securing and delivering work has been its ability to embrace new technologies and drive these to deliver value to their customer base. Joblogic has been at the heart of this as the primary operating system used by the business.

“One of the great things about the system is that you can use it anywhere, on any device. It provides information to our engineers in a clear and concise way, and they always have the details they need to hand” says Dean. “The user interface and navigation through the system is very intuitive - what to click on, how to record the work in the various fields, all the processes – with everything automatically linked to each other, we are able to make the right decisions for our customers and engineers, based on the whole picture. Having to migrate over 140 engineers through to a new system, it was a huge decision maker that the system was straightforward and very user friendly.”

Aside from the internal efficiencies Joblogic has brought to Thermatic – the Joblogic platform has equally brought a number of benefits for client-side engagement.

“The customer portal provides greater value to our customers” says Dean. “We show them the system, explain the integration process and precisely how we are going to deliver their requirements. Through the client portal the system makes it easy for them to log a job, ultimately getting their issue resolved quicker. The right skilled engineer then arrives on site and has all the information they need, hugely impacting our first-time fix rate – that’s essential for our business.”

A vast database of useful data

The amount of data that the system captures is also considerable, helping Thermatic interrogate and understand the effectiveness and profitability of its own operations, including first-time-fix rates and the variances of performance across its field engineering team. It also provides extensive downloadable data that can be shared with customers, including helping them with their compliance requirements.

With Joblogic’s open API, Thermatic can be extremely flexible around integrating with their clients’ bespoke systems, allowing them access into their data, or even allowing them to use the system as their primary management tool.

“Compliance and H&S are at the heart of what we do, so data is everything to our operation. All our data is stored securely in line with our ISO27001 accreditation”.

“Like any IT system, it’s always a work in progress and can be improved,” Dean concludes. “But Joblogic actively encourages feedback and – rather than telling us how to work around problems – quickly find lasting user-friendly solutions,”

“Through what we have delivered together to far, and our plans for the future, our partnership with Joblogic was 100% the right move for Thermatic to continue it’s growth over the years to come”