How OVTS is cleaning up using vWork digital workflows

Otago Vacuum Tank Services (OVTS) takes automation to the next level

According to OVTS Commercial Lead Courtney Giddens, vWork was recommended by a business partner. “We were looking for a workflow solution and it ticked all the boxes - especially being NZ made,” Courtney explains. “It turned out to be really important for us to have that local support. If we ever have an issue, no matter what it is, the vWork support team is back to us really quickly and are straight onto getting it resolved.”

OVTS delivers industrial, commercial and residential liquid waste removal services across Otago. It runs a fleet of specialist trucks including 3,500Lt to 12,000Lt Vacuum Trucks, 10,000Lt Hydro Excavation Truck, 15,000Lt Water Delivery truck, and a Jet Unit Truck which has capabilities for low to medium pressure water blasting and drain unblocking.

It enables OVTS to offer a wide range of services including septic tank cleaning, grease trap servicing, freshwater delivery, sump cleaning, hydro excavation, water tank cleaning, drain unblocking, emergency spill response and portaloo servicing. Essential, often urgent, business critical services that you don’t really think about - unless you are a client.

“We do the full range of liquid waste removal and water delivery” explains Courtney, “ but we also do hyrdro excavation, blockages, water blasting and dry waste work as well - including removing sawdust from skip bins as they fill up.”

Not only do these services generate a range of different workflows drivers are required to follow - some of the larger customers have very specific needs that also need to be captured and automated. The ease of which the workflows could be configured in vWork was definitely a plus.

“Drivers can be on a site with around seven different templates for that one customer.  All of them showing a unique workflow and all pre-loaded just ready to be delivered against. It makes those repeated jobs really easy and means any of our drivers can handle them.

“It is a level of sophistication our customers don’t expect from a firm that isn’t a large, national provider. They really like seeing our drivers on site with a tablet to manage their jobs. I showed it to one of the facilities managers we work with and she was amazed to see how the jobs pop up to be scheduled on the tablet and then - ping - she gets a confirmation email in real time.”

OVTS are really pleased with how well its drivers have taken to using the tablets with minimal complaints. Courtney reports they are no longer having to worry about job sheets being left in trucks, , or having to come back and translate their handwriting because something was done at speed on the fly and is hard to read.

“Now everything is automated, the errors are way less and nothing gets missed,” she says. “That is particularly true with managing our grease trap cleaning. These are repeat jobs but with a wide range of different time frames based on the size of the restaurant and volume going through the restaurant kitchen.

“Some need cleaning every 10 days, others it can be up to three months.  Managing this on a spreadsheet was a really really horrible manual process and time consuming. Now I don’t even have to think about it - the jobs just get scheduled when they should be, like clockwork.

“We probably made a bigger investment than usual in doing the set up because of the large number of workflows but the time we are saving now, from getting that right, is greater than we imagined.”

That is especially true with invoicing, having vWork integrated with Xero literally saves OVTS days every month that it can put into doing more valuable work.

“While we always tried to invoice as we go, we invariably ended up with 150 job sheets to manually invoice at the end of each month - which consumed a good five days of my time,” says Courtney.

Now the jobs automatically generate an invoice on completion which is pushed through as a draft into Xero. The finance team can review these at the end of each day and then approve for sending. If there is a query a hyperlink in Xero takes them to vWork to access any information needed, directly from the job - it is that simple.

Courtney is also a fan of vWork reporting. "While it wasn’t a feature they were originally looking for, but it is now a valued addition.

“It enables us to report on KPIs set by customers including carbon emission reporting,” explains Courtney. “Using a combination of vWork and EROAD data we can calculate the carbon emissions simply through introducing a couple of clicks into the drivers vWork app. This capability has enabled us to bid for some really big RFPs that would usually only be open to the really large firms.”