Fleet Plant Hire (FPH)

http://www.fph.com.au

FPH Online Business System - The Chase

The FPH business is unique in that it has a few hundred large customers in the construction industry (e.g. Leightons, Multiplex), which undertake multi-million dollar construction projects. These projects require plant and equipment - like trucks, bobcats and earth moving machinery - to construct roads and buildings around Melbourne.

With many hundreds more small suppliers (i.e. owners of the trucks, bobcats and earth moving equipment the customers need) on its book, FPH has a daily challenge of matching the right supplier to work with the right customer. Compounding the pressure and complexity in a day at FPH is the fact that most customers give less than 24 hours notice of their needs!! Further, if the weather is adverse on a day FPH had to call hundreds of suppliers to cancel their work for that day. All-in-all there is a lot of information flying about between the small team of FPH operators (who seem to be constantly on the phone) and customers and suppliers.

It was with these challenges in mind that FPH decided to work with Get Started to firstly undertake some business process re-engineering (BPR), then secondly design and have built a web-based custom business system. This system allows them to store and share information on customers, jobs, suppliers and equipment quickly and easily.

The new FPH system, which they call The Chase, allows them to:

• create and track quotes
• manage plant and truck jobs via 2 very powerful and complex screens (which allows the operator to see all current jobs and their status, and quickly allocate or move suppliers around jobs)
• create customer invoices and subsequent receipts and debts chasing
  
• create 'reciprocated' invoices for suppliers and pay them via EFT
• track a plethora of information on each customer and supplier
• track and warn of 'personality clashes' of staff at a customer and supplier BEFORE an operator allocates the two together and incites some unhappiness at the project site!
• SMS one or a group of suppliers to see who is interested in a particular job, or to cancel a job due to poor weather

The result from the project is a very powerful web-based custom business system which has provided FPH the ability to grow further (in an already fast growing industry), more efficiently, with less people and less reliance on key personnel. For a business turning over tens of millions of dollars, efficient and dependable systems are a crucial factor in not only business survival, but continued growth.