On October 2, 2019, we met Thomas Brunet, BYES works manager in Montrabé... or Montrabe, since the commune still seems to be divided by the spelling! Thomas is in charge of a works cell dedicated to Enedis and GRDF, composed of 30 employees and specialized in public works. Every day, he has to call or text his team leaders in the field to find out how the work is going. Then he has to pass on the information efficiently to the business managers, who have to justify to the client the agency's nearly €4.5 million in annual sales.
Before we arrived, Thomas was sending a lot of text messages to keep up to date on job site. Team leaders were calling to report problems. And business managers would ask technicians to send them photos on WhatsApp so they could forward them to the customer via email. Despite the existence of internal software, information still circulates a lot by phone, since "it remains the most flexible method of communication" (Thomas Brunet).
On November 25, 2019, the Kraaft app was rolled out to the entire team. And in just a few weeks, behaviors have drastically changed among these new kraafers. At the beginning of each job site, the person in charge now creates a ticket on the app with the project name, and then registers on the interface as the lead. As progress is made, technicians send photos, voice notes and text messages to the group, so everyone has the same level of information about the work. Project managers can export this data by generating one-click reports and automatically sort photos by project.
When Loïc Guillet, Thomas' operations manager for the Midi-Pyrénées region, met with us on January 17 at the BYES offices, his analysis was clear.
"We had a hole in the racket. With the digital world, the job site log disappeared (...) What we were missing was a tool for communication between teams, to track activities in a flexible way. Especially when the people involved change and the project is longer term." (Loïc Guillet, BYES operations manager, Midi-Pyrénées)
And it is perhaps this need that explains the high usage of the tool during the first eight weeks of implementation.
After eight weeks of use, here are the reasons managers, business managers and technicians give us for recommending Kraaft to peers or colleagues.
"It is very important for us that we can offer a tool to our technicians that is easy to learn and install." (Loïc Guillet)
We receive a lot of positive feedback on the interface of our messaging system and it's a pleasure because we work every day on its simplicity! Kraaft is a voice-based communication, adapted to the field and easily traceable. For anyone. So when we get compliments because the implementation is easy, even when there are profiles that are less comfortable with digital solutions in the team, it touches us! 😍
"Quite naturally, it frees up phone time, and we get more feedback than before (...) I see an improvement in performance" (Thomas Brunet)
And who better than our everyday users to describe this time and value gain?
Increasing the collaboration of your teams is not only about reducing the time wasted in exchanging information, often lost or siloed. It also improves profitability because it is easier to explain the delta between planned and actual work, and therefore easier to get paid for overtime.
"Before we had a hard time putting issues into context. It's not easy to explain the delta between what we planned and what we did, that information is floating around on text messages, WhatsApp, phone calls. There are too many ways to communicate." (Thomas Brunet)
"With Kraaft, we can reduce the risk of accidents because we have a better knowledge of the teams on job site of what happened before. (Loïc Guillet)
