Smart Care Equipment Solutions

Smart Care Equipment Solutions is North America’s premier service organization serving more than 45,000 commercial foodservice operations. With a decade of tech experience, Smart Care blends excellent customer service with advanced technology to provide commercial kitchen equipment and appliance service, repair, and maintenance.

The Need for Timely Insight

Chris Buschmann, VP of IT at Smart Care, having leveraged data in previous roles, engaged Blue Margin (BMI) to drive operational and financial progress. In particular, they needed timely insight into which customers would have the greatest impact on growth. His team was spending 4 hours per week parsing and pivoting data that only provided limited insight, lacking visual trends, KPIs, and actionable insights. Additionally, impacts from a reorganization and the COVID-19 pandemic required better insight into labor utilization to maintain (and improve) margins.

Dashboards Provide Insight Into Service Calls

To improve organizational alignment and accountability, BMI developed dashboards that provided on-time insight into service calls, segmenting demand by geography and service type, enabling the company to focus resources toward trending customer needs and coordinate departments around market trends. Other areas addressed included: First-Time Fix Metrics, Supply Chain Efficiency, Open Call Aging, Technician Backlog, and Client-Facing Service Metrics.

Prior to BMI, 47 of Smart Care’s employees contributed to exporting data from their ERP, developing pivot tables, and writing Excel reports. Their key metrics are now automated and centrally viewable by all stakeholders. The limitations of Smart Care’s previous reporting made it difficult for new employees to acclimate to their roles and the metrics they were accountable to deliver. The dashboard initiative reduced that ramp-up time from 1-2 years down to a few months.

Power BI Increases Utilization from 68% to 72%

The impact of data intelligence was far-reaching during a year marked by COVID-19 challenges. According to Chris Buschmann, “Smart Care was able to adjust the labor and cost structure of the organization to fit changing market dynamics leading to increased profitability from March through August 2020, even with revenue down 30-40%.” The transformative effect of their dashboards “took [labor] utilization up from 68% to 72%, just by creating visibility and awareness.”

The impact of dashboards on the organization, from executives to technicians, is better alignment on priorities and a stronger sense of shared accountability throughout. As Buschmann puts it, these dashboards are helping Smart Care “establish their service identity as an organization.”