D. Wardle (Plant) Limited
D. Wardle (Plant) Limited are suppliers of earthmoving and materials handling solutions to the UK industry since 1965. For over forty years, the quarrying industry has come to Wardle for earthworks contracting and plant hire services. Their dedication to excellence in every aspect of the business – and their uncompromising targeting of continuous improvement – has earned them a place as a market leader in earthmoving and materials handling solutions.
Road to Paper Zero
In today’s dynamic digital world, the push for businesses to adapt and evolve is more pressing than ever. For D. Wardle (Plant) Limited (DWP), a leader in earthmoving and plant hire services, the ambition is to achieve a paper-zero operation by 2025. This is not just an operational change; it is their pledge to improve environmental sustainability and a strategy to streamline their business practices.
When Future Solutions first partnered with DWP, we were tasked with conducting a full systems audit. DWP has been using Podio since 2014; hence, their platform was well-established and catered for most of their business processes. The audit helped us greatly to understand the system but, more importantly, the intricacies of a very specialised business. It soon became clear to us that our client’s ambition was huge since for over the last 40 years the organisation has been predominately paper-based. How could we assist this well-established organisation in transitioning from paper-reliant workflows to a fully digital, efficient model without causing disruption?
The answer lay in Procfu Mini Apps—highly adaptable and user-friendly solutions that allow employees and clients to work with your Podio data from outside of Podio. We knew that this could fundamentally revamp DWP’s daily operations and save hundreds of hours of admin time. The results so far have been nothing short of remarkable, the processing time for daily plant safety checks has been reduced by 75%, while the percentage of late paperwork fell from 40% to 5%. Even though the project is still ongoing, we’ve already observed significant progress toward DWP’s 2025 goal. In this article, you can find out more about the challenges faced and solutions we have implemented.
The Challenge
DWP operates on many different sites around the country and uses a lot of heavy machinery that needs to be inspected regularly using checksheets. For years, all site paperwork (inspections, timesheets etc) had to be completed on paper and then posted to the head office. Once the paperwork arrived, all of the data had to be keyed in. That process is obviously very labour-intensive and means that information is entered into the system on a weekly basis, in arrears, rather than in real time.
Another challenge was to enable Plant Engineers to return job cards for repairs and maintenance to the plant fleet. They used to complete written job cards describing the work done, which were then added to Podio manually in the office.
We have also created Procfu portals for the company’s clients to access to all relevant documentation for their site – risk assessments, method statements, safe systems of work, personnel competency and training records, and plant maintenance records. Before this implementation, the solution in place was based on sharing folders with documents. The system worked but it required a lot of effort from the admin team to keep everything up to date – with the Procfu solution this work has disappeared entirely.
Finally, after developing the portals we were challenged to find a way to enable all stakeholders to use a single login to gain access to the different portals.
Three words to describe Future Solutions: “Ambitious, Likeable, Responsive.
You could, as a company, look at what you’re developing for us and say, ‘This is too risky, we’ll have to fix it if it goes wrong.’ You could easily stick to low complexity work but you’re prepared to go beyond that, and I appreciate that. Obviously, you’re nice guys to work with. And by ‘responsive,’ I mean you understand stuff quickly and deliver it quickly. We really value that. That’s great.”
Key Improvements
- Reduced processing time by 75%
- Decreased late returns of machine inspections from 40% to 5%
- Reduced paper-based job cards by 100%, and eliminated delays in closing plant maintenance jobs
The Solution
Approach:
In order to find the most suitable solution and agree on the scope of work, we established weekly meetings with the DWP team. These discovery sessions were key to increasing our understanding of the roles and challenges faced by each stakeholder. We agreed that Procfu Mini Apps was the way forward, as the Podio platform was already well-established within the business. We could create and tailor a portal for each key stakeholder group that caters to their unique roles and responsibilities.
Implementation Plan:
- Design a scope for each portal type
- Build the portal using existing apps with customised fields
- Conduct internal acceptability testing
- User acceptance testing conducted by selected stakeholders
- Apply changes discovered during testing
- Roll out to more users
Client Testimonial
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