Podfather Software Cleans Up ESG at Kingdom Clear
Overview
Kingdom Clear is a national contract window cleaning company that provides services throughout Scotland and England, servicing high street retail, leisure, and hospitality brands. With over 100 years of combined experience, they offer window cleaning, pressure washing, graffiti removal, rope access, reach and wash poles, and hydraulic platforms to clients such as hotels, shopping centres, gyms, nursing homes, and schools.
Workplace health and safety is integral to Kingdom Clear's ethos, and the company adheres to strict safety protocols to ensure the wellbeing of clients and technicians, alongside the protection of property.
30,000
paper sheets saved per year
Challenge
Prior to using Podfather, Kingdom Clear was going through a significant business transition and found that their existing software system was inadequate for their evolving needs. They required a more flexible solution to handle complex operations and diverse client reporting demands without draining administrative resources.
- Their previous system could not adapt to suit the changing needs of the business during a period of transition.
- The company was heavily reliant on paper-based planning and reporting processes, resulting in excessive administrative overhead and environmental waste.
- Field staff were required to travel into the office to collect daily schedules and job sheets, causing wasted work-hours and unnecessary mileage.
Solution
Kingdom Clear made the switch to Podfather, utilising its routing and scheduling capabilities to automatically schedule jobs and optimise routes. Daily schedules and job sheets are now sent directly to field staff via the Podfather mobile app, eliminating the need for technicians to physically visit the office before heading out across Scotland and England.
The configurable nature of Podfather allowed Kingdom Clear to adapt the system's existing functionality to support their specific workplace health and safety protocols. They tweaked the standard routine vehicle checks to create a suite of monthly equipment checks suitable for vital safety gear like ladders and harnesses, and they also embraced the electronic Proof of Delivery (ePOD) functionality to capture time, date, and location-stamped photographs and signatures in real-time.
Results
The implementation of Podfather has yielded significant environmental and operational benefits, supporting the company's ESG aspirations by saving approximately a quarter of a million sheets of paper to date. The automated delivery of job sheets to the field app has drastically cut down on wasted work-hours and mileage each week by removing the need for staff to commute to the office.
Furthermore, Kingdom Clear has radically improved its customer service by customising its reporting to suit the diverse needs of individual clients. Whether a customer requires completion notices sent immediately, jobs grouped by location and sent weekly, ePODs attached to end-of-month invoices, or direct self-service access via a secure login, the flexibility of the system easily accommodates all scenarios.
While the use of ePODs is pretty much standard across the window cleaning sector, each client actually wants different information at different times. This requirement, and the surprisingly complex nature of what we do, makes the flexibility of Podfather's reporting integral to our offering. For example, some customers want completion notices sent to a single point of contact as the work is finished, whilst others want jobs grouped by location and only sent once a week. Other clients want ePODs attached to invoices at the end of the month and others want to access the information themselves as and when it's needed. Using Podfather we can easily configure our reporting to adapt to all scenarios, giving each customer the experience they want.
Alison Reed
Office Manager, Kingdom Clear
