About LaundryTec
LaundryTec supplies industrial laundry equipment to the healthcare sector, nuclear industry, airlines, prisons, residential properties, and the military in the UK.
They currently have a market share of 30%-40% of UK’s care homes, including Care UK, Advinia Healthcare, and The Disabilities Trust, each of which has between 30 and 300 care homes in their group.
LaundryTec works on projects with architects, builders and operators to offer turnkey laundry solutions, including, design, project management, installation, training and after sales support.
They currently have a team size of 10 sales, service and maintenance staff that need to manage the customer base around the country.
In early 2020, LaundryTec’s Director of Sales, Stefan Drapan, was responsible for managing this team and ensuring that:
- The customer received quotes on time
- Service calls were responded to correctly
- Preventive maintenance activities were planned and completed
To do this, Stefan and his team were managing all their different activities in multiple systems, including email, Excel and a home grown quote management software. They also had multiple Whatsapp groups that they used to try to manage their communication.
These disconnected systems often resulted in mistakes and errors, especially in ensuring that people were available on time, in the right place with the right spare parts. It was also extremely difficult to track and root cause these problems as and when they did occur.
Ultimately, this meant that customers often did not get supplied on time and service calls were missed or poorly attended to. In addition, there were significant wastage and scrap costs resulting from incorrect ordering or misplacement of spare parts.
What made LaundryTec choose Unifize?
Over the years, LaundryTec had tried to solve their problems using multiple different approaches. Initially, they tried to build a custom solution using a third party software development company, which resulted in them spending thousands of pounds and getting nowhere.
They then tried Salesforce which, according to Stefan Drapan, “didn’t do anything we wanted it to do”. They finally experimented with Airtable, which appeared to be much more flexible but was still not able to handle the relatively complex collaborative needs of their organisation.
Stefan Drapan was introduced to Unifize in early 2020 and he immediately saw its value for LaundryTec. In particular, what he resonated most with was the ability to have individual conversations with each of his core processes, whether that was a service call, inquiry, installation or preventative maintenance activity.
This meant that they could get the speed and flexibility of real-time conversations combined with more granular control and visibility into his processes. It also meant that he and his team could quickly share relevant details for each sales order, including:
- Receipts
- Invoices
- Tracking numbers
- Pictures
- Shipments
In doing this, Unifize immediately brought everyone onto the same page about their objectives and eliminated handover errors and delays.
“Everybody can get involved now because everybody can know every single detail, every single process of [each] job…so it’s not down to one person anymore.”
What were the results?
In January 2020, LaundryTec did a team demo with Unifize via Zoom. Thereafter, everybody downloaded the app and were using the application within an hour.
- Eliminated daily confusion around who needed to do what, when & why
- Enabled planning for two weeks in advance
- Increase engagement on core processes to the entire team
- Reduced the number of different systems from 5 to 2
- Increase visibility into 4 core sales, service and maintenance activities
- Eliminated the need for email and cumbersome Whatsapp groups
