How Fabelta gained more than 30% in work order processing productivity.

Tell us about your company and its business.

Fabelta is a window and door manufacturing company that sells its products under the Fabelta brand. Our expertise ranges from design/R&D to aftermarket services, including manufacturing, delivery, and installation.
 
Our main markets are in the residential sector:

• High-end homes (40%) – new houses, lakeside chalets, duplexes and triplexes, etc.
• High rise buildings (40%)
• Renovations (20%)

Our brand differentiators are the following:

• Custom products that go beyond standard offerings
• 100% of our products are made from aluminum
• Compliance with the required standards

Why did you choose the Praxedo solution? What challenges were you trying to solve?

Our initial needs were mainly in the area of mobility because we wanted to convert our paper work orders to electronic format to streamline our business processes. We needed to improve efficiency in the way we completed our work in order to achieve this.
 
Our teams used paper instructions, and the installers (or subcontractors) created reports by hand. That meant reports were only generated and validated once a week most of the time. Then it took time to go through the reports to review the details and to identify errors and information that was missing. This was tedious, so standardizing and structuring reports as well as digitizing processes were part of our objectives to simplify analysis and accelerate processing.

Who uses the Praxedo solution and for what purposes?

Three dedicated teams use Praxedo at Fabelta:

• Project managers: they exclusively make advance site visits to take measurements and validate the feasibility of installations. They use Praxedo software to produce a report, which is then sent to the contractor, who can make corrections.
• Installers: these are our employees and subcontractors. Three technicians have used Praxedo for two years to get installation instructions and place orders. They use forms to create installation compliance reports. Each team typically consists of 5 people with a team leader who is in charge of the work order report.
• Aftermarket service technicians: they get involved at the end of jobs that were not completed, or if there are service calls to do. They’ve been using Praxedo for 6 months. For this part of our business, the advanced scheduling in Praxedo is critical.

From the beginning, we were convinced that Praxedo was the right solution and we decided to integrate it into our ERP system. Our orders are generated in the ERP system, then work orders are automatically created in Praxedo. Our entire information system is interconnected.

What are the main benefits of the Praxedo solution?

Generating electronic reports brings a lot of efficiency and speed to our processes. We used to wait for reports to be available once a week, at the end of the week, but now they’re created instantly.
 
Using paper left room for different interpretations depending on the descriptions in the work orders. With Praxedo and the flexibility to design custom forms, we’ve standardized the information to be included in reports with drop-down lists and checkboxes. We’ve increased our productivity by 30 – 50% compared to the time required for end-of-work analysis.
 
Order forms and paperwork orders were getting lost and there were numerous errors. Now everything is digitized so issues and lost documents have been eliminated. We estimate that we’ve reduced errors by at least 30% compared to our situation before implementing Praxedo.
 
Team leaders who found that using a new app was slightly annoying at first now can’t live without it.
It’s a tool that allows us to do more with less. Praxedo has allowed us to manage and limit our hiring.
 
In a nutshell, everyone’s job has been simplified and the process is much smoother.

How do you see the future of your relationship with Praxedo?

We will continue to deploy the application across our Aftermarket Sales / Customer Service department. There are still improvements to be made to the interface between Praxedo and our ERP that will enable better management of work order processing and dispatching.
 
We also want to continue the deployment with other teams of contract installers.
 
Finally, we plan to integrate our drivers (delivery team) in 2021.

If you had to summarize the Praxedo solution in 2 words, what would they be?

Efficiency and flexibility. In fact, the solution can be used for several aspects of our business and can be easily adapted to different operational processes. Creating reports has become a very simple task.