#1 Regional Plumbing Service Big Birge Uses ClearPathGPS To Make Smart Dispatching Decisions And Improve Service

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Big Birge Plumbing Uses ClearPathGPS to Make Smart Dispatching Decisions and Improve Service

” We have a real-time view of every truck’s location at any given moment. That makes dispatching our crews—and communication among the team in general—much more efficient

John Schlumberger Finance Controller

About Big Birge Plumbing

Big Birge Plumbing is one of the most trusted and in-demand service companies in the Omaha Metropolitan area. Omaha Magazine has named the company a “Best Plumbing Services” provider many years in a row. And customers who have used the company’s services—plumbing repairs and installations, commercial plumbing, and plumbing remodeling—will tell you the same thing. Among Big Birge Plumbing’s large number of Google Reviews, which span many years, the company has earned a nearly perfect customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars.

Challenges

With nearly a dozen trucks in the field at any given time, at jobsites all across the Omaha Metro area, the company needed a more effective and reliable way to keep track of all of its journeyman plumbers and apprentices—and to know which crew to contact when a new job order came in.

Here’s how John Schlumberger, the company’s Finance Controller, explains the challenge they faced: “On any day, we might have guys at several houses doing sink or piping repairs, other crews across town doing a remodeling job, and still other crews working on new construction projects like a school or apartment building. We didn’t have a way to know at all times exactly where all of those teams were.”

At-a-Glance

Company: Big Birge Plumbing

Industry: Plumbing repairs and installations, commercial plumbing, and plumbing remodeling

Fleet: 10 Vehicles

Location: Omaha, Nebraska

Needs: Keeping track of the plumbers and which crew to dispatch

Solution: Vehicle tracking service with real-time visibility

”I really appreciate being able to click a button and see where everyone is—or where one particular person or crew is—at any given time.

John Schlumberger

Solution

John first learned about ClearPathGPS through the field-service software that Big Birge Plumbing has used for years, ServiceTitan, which integrates with ClearPathGPS.

As John recognized immediately, installing GPS units on the company’s trucks and monitoring them via the online tracking app would give Big Birge Plumbing the real-time visibility they needed to know where their entire field staff was at all times. This would greatly help the team in the office make better dispatching and routing decisions.

Results

With ClearPathGPS, John and his team at Big Birge Plumbing now had one-click access to the information they needed to find the right people for each job and get crews to customers more quickly—all of which helped to improve their already-impressive customer service.

“When we need to find the right crew to send to a jobsite, we can quickly narrow down the list just by looking at the app. And we don’t have to waste time asking any of them, ‘Where are you?’”

“I have the ClearPathGPS map on my screen all the time,” John says. “That view shows me the locations of all our vehicles at once, as well as how long each one has been at its current site. That’s important, too, because it helps us figure out on the fly not only which crews are in the area of a new job request, but also which of those crews are likely to be wrapping up their work soon.”

Here’s how John summarizes the benefits of the ClearPathGPS solution.

Improved dispatching and communication

“We have a real-time view of every truck’s location at any given moment. That makes dispatching our crews—and communication among the team in general—much more efficient. When we need to find the right crew to send to a jobsite, we can quickly narrow down the list just by looking at the app. And we don’t have to waste time asking any of them, ‘Where are you?’”
Better visibility into crew behavior

“We use the app primarily for real-time tracking and dispatching, but I also go into the system to see if our guys are showing up to their customer jobs on time. We’ve got a great team, so they are. But it’s nice to see confirmation of that.”
More capacity to serve customers

“This app definitely saves our crews a lot of time, because we’re not sending someone clear across town to a jobsite when another crew was available and a lot closer. Less time traveling to and from jobs means our crews have more time to see more customers—and that is having an effect on our bottom line.”

At ClearPathGPS we help field service businesses—including landscaping companies, plumbers, roofers, and HVAC businesses and, more—improve their operations and improve their bottom lines. To learn more about how businesses like Big Birge Plumbing benefit from the ClearPathGPS fleet tracking solutions, contact us today!