Having already made waves within the transportation sector, vWork is not a business to rest on its laurels. It has identified the potential for crane companies to benefit from using its cloud-based software.
The vWork job management software streamlines the scheduling systems for crane hire companies, allowing teams to clearly and efficiently plan a day’s scheduling across a number of assets.
Sam Edmond and Dean Oswald have helped a range of companies roll out the product and have an in depth understanding of the features and benefits of vWork.
“For many businesses, planning a day can be extremely challenging,” said Edmond.
“Crane companies have a range of assets and crews deployed to a vast array of sites on any given day. vWork is designed to simplify the planning processes for these businesses.”
“There are obviously numerous moving parts around the operation of a fleet of cranes, and vWork helps the business to centralise the management of disciplines such as allocation and scheduling, as well as managing paperwork relating to site compliance and induction,” he said.
vWork features a drag and drop scheduling process. This feature enables the user to move jobs around easily with visual aids, helping to simplify the process. The drag and drop feature can help the allocation of different types of equipment in the fleet, including cranes, but it can also manage the allocation of the work force, moving individuals from job site to job site.
vWork features templates that help to manage the required checks on a crane before it is mobilised to site. The templates include pre-start checks, rigging equipment inspections, and counterweight inspections, ensuring all the required equipment is packed and ready for action when the crane and support vehicles get to site.
“One of the unique features of vWork is the customer communication and alerting system. If a step is missed in the process for whatever reason, an alert is immediately sounded for the dispatcher or line manager,” said Oswald.
vWork assists in all facets of preparing the crane and crew for the lift. When a crane arrives on site, vWork asks the team if the lift plan has been completed for the job and only when a crew member acknowledges that there is a lift plan in place does vWork sign it off so the lift can commence.
“In terms of health and safety, vWork ensures that critical documents are prepared and included or acknowledged before a lift can proceed.” “vWork helps identify issues. These are flagged and alerted straight away, and teams can jump on to and manage any issues immediately. Dispatchers and site crew collaborate seamlessly, rather than relying on site workers to report back to head office at the end of the working day. There are no delays in reporting and actions can be managed in real time,” said Oswald.
vWork also allows the placement of ‘tags’ on a particular item or piece of equipment. The tags enable the user to view the certificates and compliance information relating to the equipment.
vWork also provides flexibility. A hire company, for example, can schedule future jobs to a specific piece of equipment or specific workers. The vWork dashboard is an asset for users – it simply lays out schedules and gives quick access to equipment its working and service history.
“When we are setting up vWork for a customer, we can list all of their equipment or cranes, and its utilisation for the day, week, or month. Depending on how they want to receive the reports, customers are able allocate revenue against a specific piece of equipment or user,” said Oswald.
“The reporting function also enables the customer to understand what the piece of equipment is generating in real-time and it also ensures that equipment is not being overworked helping to reduce downtime and the need for servicing and repairs.”
A challenge faced by planners and allocators is understanding where each equipment piece is required at any given time. vWork eliminates this problem.
For the planning stages, vWork provides different job statuses, including draft, assigned, unpublished or published. This will be an assigned or unpublished job, depending on the stage of booking.
The planner can record a job with a start date and start time and put it in the workbench. This, this acts as a timeline and shows every customer that has requested a job. A dispatcher can then go into the program and confirm jobs and move them around to ensure there is no crossover of the same asset.
In the customer portal, vWork provides three options that show a dispatcher the ‘resource level’. Green indicates there are a number of availabilities in terms of equipment and staff. Grey indicates nothing is available and yellow indicates equipment and staff are moderately available.
vWork has the ability to integrate across other platforms to ensure users are minimising errors and enhancing business processes.
“Whether it’s a CMS, another tool or another piece of software, vWork provides a robust API [application programming interface] which can integrate the platforms,” said Oswald.
“A key example is invoicing. vWork integrates with Xero and MYOB AccountRight so, when a job is completed, the invoicing process is automated. If it’s time-based billing, it’s down to the minute and, once the job is completed, it generates an invoice in their relevant accounting platform and prints the invoice.”
The challenge in an established industry such as the lifting sector is making changes in technology as simple as possible. vWork endeavours to work closely with operators to make this transition seamless.
“Whilst vWork is simple to use it is not a plug in and play. Our onboarding team work closely with customers to customise templates the features to meet a company’s specific needs. Once onboarding is finished, we continue to work closely with our customers to ensure the vWork runs as smoothly as possible,” said Oswald.
“vWork is very flexible and we’ll work with the customer on their specific requirements and there is often the potential for us to build features to suit specific needs. What a customer’s business needs today, isn’t necessarily what it will need tomorrow or next month, let alone next year.
“vWork is designed to move and grow with the customer’s business. If changes are required to templates, there is no need to engage a software developer, we will manage this in-house.
“We understand a customer’s business will change and evolve and so will the demands on its assets including its work force. We see this as a great opportunity for vWork and we are more than prepared to move with them,” said Oswald.