W. W. Williams keeps things running
Founded in 1912 as a small family-owned business, W.W. Williams has evolved into one of America’s most diversified providers of commercial vehicle and equipment service, representing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and aftermarket parts, provides innovative power generation solutions, transport refrigeration, marine maintenance, and logistics strategies. Their customers include airports, commercial truck fleets, construction companies, data centers, hospitals, Department of Defense, U.S. Military, vehicle OEMs, and boat owners, and more.
While the company operates in over 50 locations throughout the U.S. and Mexico, doing work in their service centers, they also provide on-site services to many of their customers. They have more than 1,250 staff members working in many departments to keep operations running for their customers.
We recently spoke with several folks at W. W. Williams about how they’ve incorporated Teamup as an essential part of their field operations:
- Marc Menhart, Director of IT
- Jim Simpson, Software Development Manager
- Eric Boyette, Divisional Service Manager
The challenge: Get critical information to field techs
A key part of what W. W. Williams provides is field work. Hundreds of technicians provide essential service work all over the United States. Often, business operations depend on the equipment being maintained, installed, or repaired by the technicians. There’s pressure to get things done quickly, often in less-than-ideal environments. Each technician relies on having accurate details about each job in order to get things done.
“Our techs are out in the field. Dispatch is working to share critical information with their technicians—details about the equipment they’re servicing, the parts they need, the locations, and any important access notes,” says Marc. Without this information, the techs cannot do their jobs and work grinds to a halt.
“We are talking about tens of thousands of jobs per year. Five minutes lost on each one, or potential for a data entry error: that’s a huge, huge deal.”
Complex work
The work done by technicians is complex all by itself. The last thing these techs need is another complicated tool to deal with. Their attention needs to be on the job they’re sent to do, not on how to get the information about that job.
“The more ease of access and simplicity we can give them, the easier it is for them to do what they actually need to do,” says Eric. “The calendar isn’t their job. Computers aren’t their job. Their job is to rip an engine to the bare block and put it back together. They need a lot of information, they need accurate information, and they need a tool that doesn’t get in their way, cause unnecessary changes, or make the process unwieldy.”
Changing environments
Technicians are not working in ideal environments with easy access to a laptop or any means of viewing engine specs or other crucial details. “Sometimes they’re in the bottom of a ship, or a basement; they’re all over the place. They’re literally all over the world. We go all over the place doing all kinds of things,” says Eric.
The techs need access to accurate information, from the work location to contact info, serial numbers, engine specifications, and detailed instructions, and they can’t pause to find a desk or computer to get it. It needs to be available on their phones, updated and accurate, so they can find the right information no matter where they are or what they’re working on.
Urgent updates
Because the techs provide a lot of emergency responses, the schedules are subject to change. If an emergency need comes in, the dispatchers will shift things around to deal with the crisis as soon as possible. “What your calendar says right now may be different ten minutes from now,” says Eric. “And it was very difficult for us to make those kind of changes before Teamup.”
What didn’t work
Teamup wasn’t the first stop on the road to a solution for this innovative team. “We’ve tried a few different approaches to streamline this process. The most recent attempt was using shared Outlook calendars, but with so many hands involved—the service staff opening the jobs, the schedulers, the dispatchers, and the technicians—it quickly became clear that the system couldn’t keep up with our needs.” The team also found that Outlook didn’t provide the mobile interface that the technicians needed to quickly find key information at the right time.
They explored Salesforce as a potential solution, as well, but found it lacked the flexibility needed. “Salesforce can be very structured and it can do a lot of things for you. But you have to set it up in a way that it can follow the rules in order to do that,” says Marc. “With our work, there are so many moving parts that the rules aren’t helpful. The complexity of the tool itself gave it too much overhead and kept it from being useful for us.”
The Teamup solution: Simplicity to handle complexity
W. W. Williams has been working with Teamup for several years. It started as an experiment to solve a tedious dispatching process for the generator service group. Field techs weren’t able to access their job details easily in the internal ERP system. So dispatchers had started manually copying and pasting information to Teamup. Techs could use the Teamup app on their phones, in the field, to get accurate information and updates. But the manual process was unwieldy and error-prone for dispatchers.
Using Teamup’s API, the IT team built a custom integration between Teamup and the ERP system to automate the process of moving information from the ERP system to Teamup. It worked so well that they’ve now extended the Teamup solution.
“It started with the power generation group, but now we’ve extended to other field service departments doing roadside service or other on-highway types of service, marine divisions and mining divisions. We’ve been able to extend this tool because of the foundation that the generator service provided.”
Simple and accessible
“Everything was so unwieldy, but with Teamup it’s literally drag-and-drop,” says Eric. “A scheduler can redo an entire schedule by just moving their mouse a few times, and the techs still have all the information they need.” And with the Teamup app, the information is accessible for techs no matter where they are.
“A big part of the success with this system is having the Teamup app and how easy it is to use. Techs can get to a site they’ve never seen just by opening Teamup, clicking the address, and now they have directions. Things like that really have simplified getting the needed data to the people who need it.”
Visual scheduling
The color-coding capability and visual presentation of data helps a lot with processing information quickly and making sure the right details go to the right person. “From a visual standpoint, being able to see everything makes a big difference,” says Eric. “We’re scheduling equipment, we’re scheduling techs, we’re doing all kinds of things and being able to visualize something can make it easier to see where things need to go.”
Automated efficiency
Bringing the different pieces together has led to automated efficiency instead of a tedious manual process.
The IT team at W. W. Williams used Teamup’s public API to build the integration that makes it all work, and everyone benefits as a result. “This solution wouldn’t be possible without the great work from Teamup providing APIs,” says Jim. “The performance of the APIs is great and performance is always key.” Teamup’s recent update to support webhooks will allow the team to expand automations and improve workflows in the future.
“I am very excited about the recent release of webhooks and look forward to the opportunity to leverage yet another great technology in the Teamup stack.”
Customizable and scaleable
While the lack of flexibility was a problem with other options, they’ve found that Teamup is customizable in a way that makes it useful for different departments doing different things. Precisely pre-built tools are not flexible enough to work for the entire company’s operations, but supporting different automations and tools for each department is unrealistic.
Teamup provides the right balance of features and functionality they need with the flexibility to adapt.
“As an organization, we’re growing. As we add new branches, we add new calendars. It’s part of the process now, ” says Marc. “Teamup’s flexibility has allowed us to intertwine it into our operations in a very specific way.”
Responsive support
“When I have an issue and reach out to Teamup support, I’m usually hearing back from them within 8 hours; at most, 24 hours. And they have a solution for me. Since I’m creating the tool our business is actively using, it’s incredibly important to have that timely response,” says Jim.
“They’ve been incredibly receptive to what we’ve asked of them and easy to work with,” says Marc. “We want to work with organizations who help us build the solutions we need, and build good partner equity with each other.” Not being forced into a one-size-fits-all solutions gives W. W. Williams the freedom to customize, integrate, automate, and streamline their workflows in the most efficient way, without having to build it all from zero.
“We would spend a year trying to develop something internally that isn’t as good as what Teamup is now. The mobile app is exactly what we needed, so it was a foundation that we didn’t have to build. The value-add of integration on top of that lets us spend our time doing the things that are specific to our business process.”