Back in 1981, when Rick Kennedy started Kencor Elevator Systems in West Chester Pennsylvania, he wanted to build a company that was founded on family values and trust. Thirty-six years later, Rick is still the CEO of this family owned and operated business; and is the company where John Dodds, Kencor’s Chief Operating Officer has been building his career for the past 20 years. Throughout his career at Kencor, John has held various positions such as mechanic’s helper, mechanic, service manager and director of field operations. Today as COO, there are not many parts of Kencor that John doesn’t play a part in.
As COO, one of John’s mandates is to oversee the day-to-day operations at Kencor and ensure optimal efficiency and communication between the internal and external field operations. One of the major challenges that John saw was the lack of integration between their scheduling and dispatching tool and their financial software tools. This resulted in duplication of work and a potential for human error due to the double data entry that was required to retype billing info from the dispatching tool into their accounting software.
A partnership with ESS
At NAEC, John happened to meet Anita, the CEO of Expert Service Solutions and from there, Kencor and ESS began working together. Through ESS’s customer-first onboarding approach, Kencor was able to quickly train their office and field technicians on Mobile Service. By training the trainers first and installing the app themselves on all of Kencor’s mobile devices, the migration to ESS’s software was seamless and painless.
Kencor was also able to move from their manual mobile form for dispatching to ESS’s Mobile Office Manager which, through some customization, was able to fully integrate with their accounting systems. With MoM, Kencor was about to speed up their work order distribution, have full access to their data and create invoices quicker.
With the GPS function, Kencor was able to send technicians closest to incoming work orders, improving efficiency and ensuring customer calls were responded to faster. By using Recurring Manager for maintenance requests, Kencor was able to retire the excel sheets they were using, reducing manual data entry and errors.
More efficiency and better customer service
On the field side, the workers who were on-site had more access to information using Mobile Service, receiving Work Orders easily via text or email. The on-site technicians were also able to pull up service history and look at previous work tickets. This gave them greater insights on which technicians had been out before them and view past trouble-shooting methods, in order to diagnose the problem correctly and quickly. Kencor customers were also receiving better customer service, by having their issues solved in a timely manner and receiving completed tickets straight to their emails as soon as the work was completed.
It’s been five years, since Expert Service Solutions and Kencor have teamed up to help streamline elevator operations and since then, John says that ESS has been “really transformative in the way it allowed us to run our business.”
Thank you John and Kencor Elevators for giving us a glimpse into your daily operations and by sharing your ESS experience!
Expert Service Solutions, like Kencor Elevator, is a family owned and operated business, dedicated to giving their customers the most specialized and robust ERP and field management software for their business. For a free demo today, please call 1-888-596-9481.