Grease trap servicing: What to look for in a Job management platform

McDonald’s, for example, has more than 1,500 UK restaurants, each with its own grease-management servicing requirements. Every site has its own equipment, service schedule, access arrangements, maintenance history and paperwork. Then alongside the planned maintenance, there are new installations, repairs, recurring drainage problems and urgent call-outs from commercial kitchens that need issues resolved quickly. This all means that If you are responsible for keeping the operation moving, there is an ever increasing amount of work to coordinate. To run a business that services grease traps smoothly, the office needs a clear, central view of all of the day-to-day aspects of running the business from staff training records, through to purchase order histories. It is essential that communication between the office and field teams is fast and accurate. Where operatives are in real time, when they move to the next job, site evidence and completed RAMS- the faster this information is relayed to the office the sooner customers can receive reliable updates and reassurance that the jobs are being done.

The UK grease-management industry plays a key role in preventing fats, oils and grease — FOG — from entering the drainage network. The Grease Contractors Association (GCA), administered by British Water, works to improve standards across the sector, and its Certified Contractors need to be able to show that work has been carried out in line with the required guidance and procedures.

For contractors, clear working practices and accurate records are essential. Service histories, completed worksheets, before-and-after photographs and maintenance records provide evidence that work has been carried out professionally and consistently. They can also strengthen tender submissions by giving larger customers confidence that the contractor can deliver a reliable, auditable service across multiple jobs and sites. Operations and general managers need complete confidence in the whole process: planned visits happen on time, reactive work fits around the service programme, engineers arrive with the right information, site records return in a useful form, and any repairs or remedial work are followed through.

As the operation grows, the ability to manage this consistently becomes a competitive advantage. A grease trap servicing business therefore needs more than basic job scheduling. The right field service management platform should support recurring work, accurate site histories, evidence capture, remedial follow-up and the records needed to demonstrate a professional service.

A strong field service management platform should organise and store every aspect of your business from CRM, quotations, scheduling, recurring maintenance through mobile working, site and asset records, compliance, invoicing to more specialist integrations and reporting. As the business becomes more sophisticated, the requirements tend to spread further into service contracts, purchasing, stock, subcontractors, projects, customer portals and more detailed management information. As a business grows the capacity of the job management platform to hold everything together really matters. If every department is using the same platform then information is connected, communications are visible, data is reliable and outcomes are aligned.

TeamPoint has fifteen years of experience of working with businesses that include grease trap servicing as one of their core services for example Aquarius, FogTrap, The Filta Group, Aqua Mundus, Defluo and Clear Ways Drainage. Each of these companies cover planned grease trap servicing, installations, drainage, reactive work, multi-site commercial customers and wider field-service operations. Despite similarities, each uses TeamPoint in a slightly different way.

Aquarius, for example, has a predominantly planned-maintenance operation serving commercial kitchens nationwide. A key requirement is being able to take large volumes of recurring work, group jobs into practical service runs and allocate them efficiently to engineers. Defluo has a more diverse operation, spanning commercial drainage, plumbing, heating and building work. It needs to manage several disciplines, customer sites, field teams, compliance information, costs and invoicing within the same business. The Filta Group who are one of TeamPoints longest standing customers have recently added AI informed batched scheduling tools to their scheduling toolbox saving them days of routine administration every month. If we were to examine all of the companies in the UK who service grease traps we would find that each one has slightly different ways of working and slightly different priorities. An effective FSM platform accommodates difference rather than expecting similar service companies to work in the same way.

…and even though a platform may be large and complex, if it is going to be genuinely useful, it has to be simple to use. User experience is essential. The software should present each employee with the information and tools relevant to their role, helping them complete their work more quickly, easily and accurately.

Businesses using TeamPoint set permissions around individual roles, so an engineer, scheduler, accounts user or operations manager for example can each work with the information and functionality relevant to their job. Home screens can be configured around different teams, individuals and responsibilities, giving people a focused working environment while everyone continues to use the same underlying customer, site and job information. Each member of staff has access to what they need whilst management retains a view across the whole operation.

This is increasingly important as the business grows. The software needs the functionality to handle complex work without making routine tasks complicated for the people carrying them out every day.

Businesses using TeamPoint often schedule planned work using the calendar based scheduling tool. It has drag-and-drop jobs that can be assigned to operatives. Jobs and operatives details can be easily accessed making it easy for the office team to move between the diary and the information behind it. Once scheduled, jobs are dispatched to the mobile app ready for operatives in the field.

Then an urgent call comes in from a commercial kitchen.

Rather than relying on guesswork or ringing several operatives who to give this reactive job to, the scheduler can use the map to see who is nearby in real time; identify operatives with the right skills, checking estimated travel times and allocating the reactive job to the most appropriate person. The planned service programme remains visible at the same time and the chosen operatives mobile app. will automatically update, making it easier to respond quickly without unnecessarily disrupting the rest of the day's work.

This is just one single feature within a much larger platform, but I'm using it here to illustrate that good FSM software should (amongst many other advantages) save hours of admin time, keep you well informed well informed and make decisions quicker to make.

Assess how effectively the Job Management Software is supported.

When you are relying on one platform for the diary, engineer app, customer records, recurring contracts, quotations and invoicing, confidence in the support behind that software is vital. Fast, responsive technical support should be part of the buying decision when comparing field service management providers. When something goes wrong, it needs to be easy to raise a support ticket, explain the problem and get a clear response from someone who understands the system. Just as importantly, you need confidence that issues will be investigated properly and addressed as quickly as possible Waiting several days for an answer, or repeatedly having to explain the same workflow to someone who does not understand the business, is frustrating and hugely disruptive to your business.

At TeamPoint, every support ticket is acknowledged within half an hour and treated as a priority. Most issues, whether technical or training-related, are resolved the same day.

TeamPoint’s support and development teams are UK-based, and our support technicians get to know how each customer actually uses the platform. Support is not separated from the wider customer relationship; questions about workflows, new requirements and changes within the business are all part of the same ongoing conversation.

Over time, customers get to know their technical support lead by name and often work with the same people for years. That continuity makes it easier to understand the context behind a problem, respond quickly and give advice that fits the way the business really works.

Look for software that generates valuable reports.

A business managing grease trap servicing generates a huge amount of information through its everyday operations. Service visits, site histories, engineer activity, quotations, job costs, remedial work, invoices and recurring maintenance all create valuable data. When this information is captured in a business management system, it can be turned into KPIs, dashboards, charts and reports that give managers a clear, real-time view of performance. This makes it easier to spot trends, identify problems and make informed decisions based on what is actually happening across the business.

For an operations manager, that may mean seeing the planned workload ahead, jobs still outstanding and where reactive work is putting pressure on the programme. Commercial teams may want to understand how contracts are performing, where new work is coming from and whether recommendations made on site are turning into quotations and further work. Finance will be interested in costs, margins and completed work still waiting to be invoiced.

Larger customers often want better information too.

A restaurant group with dozens of locations is unlikely to want to reconstruct the performance of its maintenance programme from dozens of separate worksheets. Its facilities team may want to understand which sites have been serviced, where work remains outstanding, which locations have generated recommendations and whether the agreed programme is running as expected.

That is when platform generated reports become a valuable management tool.TeamPoint can report across the information already being captured through jobs, customers, sites, contracts and financial activity. Because those areas sit within the same platform, management can look beyond individual jobs and start seeing patterns across customers, service lines and the wider operation.

The same approach applies to long-term customers. Upgrades are supported with training around new functionality and changes to established workflows, while annual reviews provide an opportunity to look at how the system is being used and where further improvements could be made.

That relationship also extends to the way TeamPoint develops with its customers over time. Individual developments, workflow changes and custom integrations are a normal part of supporting businesses as their requirements evolve.

I’ll use some integration work for The Defluo Group as a simple example. When the company moved its finance operation onto Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, TeamPoint worked with Defluo and its Business Central partner to automate the flow of revenue and cost information between the operational and finance systems. It was not an exceptional one-off project, but the kind of practical development work that happens routinely as customers introduce new systems, processes or ways of working.

Being able to move forward is important. Choosing an FSM platform is not just about what the software can do on day one. It is also about having a provider that can continue to adapt, integrate and support you as your business grows and changes.

Look for job management software that keeps customer and site history connected.

As a business grows, it becomes harder to keep everyone working from the same customer history. A conversation may begin with one person, an engineer visits the site, somebody else prepares a quotation and six months down the line another member of the team receives a call about more work at the same site. If that history is spread across personal inboxes, phone notes, shared drives and separate systems, every handover creates an opportunity for important information to be lost, duplicated or recorded incorrectly.

A good FSM platform creates a shared customer and site history that stays with the business and is quick to access.

In TeamPoint, internal communications and emails are kept with the relevant customer, site or job, alongside site notes, photographs, worksheets, quotations, service records and supporting documents. They can be retrieved in just a couple of clicks. That gives everyone involved a clearer picture of what has already happened, what has been discussed and what needs to happen next, without relying on somebody’s inbox or memory. Customers can also be given controlled access to relevant information through the TeamPoint customer portal, including jobs, sites, assets, worksheets, files, invoices and service contracts. Quotations can be shared and accepted through the portal too.

The important point is not that more information is being stored. It is that everyone is working from the same agreed history. The engineer’s visit can inform the next quotation. The quotation can lead to further work. The next engineer can see what happened previously on site where necessary and the office can answer customer questions without starting from scratch. For a growing service business, that creates better handovers, more consistent customer service and less dependence on individual employees remembering the history of an account. The customer experiences one joined-up business, even when several different people and departments are involved.

Grease Trap Servicing: What to Look for in a Field Service Management Platform

Grease Trap Servicing: What to Look for in a Field Service Management Platform

Your FSM should incorporate your Whole Business

Job Management Software features in Practice

Assess how effectively the Job Management Software is supported.

Look for software that generates valuable reports.

Look for job management software that keeps customer and site history connected.

Choosing the right FSM platform for grease trap servicing.

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