A petrol forecourt group with more than sixty stations ran its maintenance the way most groups do. A site manager rang head office when something broke, and head office rang a contractor. The quote came back by message. A senior manager approved it on a call, and the invoice turned up some weeks later. Ask on any given morning what was broken and who was dealing with it, and nobody could say without ringing round.
How a job moves
Every job now sits in one queue from the moment a site reports it until head office closes it, and the screen always shows whose move it is.
- The site manager reports the fault on the site’s iPad, in a few taps, with a photo.
- Head office chooses the contractor and logs the quote against the job.
- The approval is recorded with the name of the person who gave it.
- When the contractor says the work is finished, the site checks it, photographs it and signs it off.
- Head office closes the job once the site has signed.
What the board sees
Spend is the first thing it changes. An approval is stored with the name of whoever gave it and the price they agreed, so when an invoice is queried six weeks later the answer is on the job and nobody has to remember a phone call.
Payment follows sign-off. A job cannot close until someone at the site has looked at the repair.
Head office also gets a view it never had. It can see every open job across the estate, how long each one has waited and at which stage, and which sites and contractors account for most of the work. Putting that picture together used to take a day on the phone.
We kept adoption out of the way. The site screens are built for a manager in the middle of a shift, and contractors have no login at all. They deal with head office exactly as they did before.
How it was built
We designed the workflow with an adviser who has spent a career in the sector, which is why it follows what an operations team really does all day. There are more than six hundred automated tests behind it. That is a lot for a system of this size, and it is deliberate: a record of who approved what is worth having only if it is never wrong.
All work