Mark Bolitho and Paul Smith met and became friends while working for the local division of the National Gas supplier (South West Gas). In 1987, after serving their apprenticeships and becoming qualified engineers, they decided on self-employment and left to create their own company: Blue Flame Heating Solutions.
“It was two of us in a van to start with,” Mark said. “But with hard work, perseverance, bags of enthusiasm and a passion for delivering a quality service, we grew, slowly and organically, over time. Today, some 33 years later, we produce yearly sales of more than £6 million, have 86 employees and over 13,000 loyal customers with over 24,000 sites between them.”
Preparing for future growth
In 2010, Mark and Paul noticed they needed more efficiency in their business to grow and service their customers.
This is when Blue Flame initially moved from paper-based processes and onboarded their first field service management solution.
“Our engineers were working off paper, which was really limiting in what we could do efficiency-wise, and it prevented us from expanding because we could only do so much with manual processes,” Mark said.
Their initial field service management solution was an improvement on the outdated manual processes of the past. But the software lacked innovation, and it didn’t integrate with their preferred accounting package, Sage.
The software that solved it all
After some thorough research Mark and his team went live with simPRO in 2018 and have seen countless benefits since.
Blue Flame had discovered the solution that enabled them to manage their workflows efficiently and importantly now connect seamlessly to Sage, eliminating the black hole of invoices and creating complete financial and operational visibility of the business.
Mark and his team are now able to collect specific details about their assets and run day-to-day operations with ease.
“We use custom fields to keep track of our assets and built a quoting structure that allows us to generate quotes rapidly and get them out quickly, too,” he explained.
“All of our recurring invoicing and contracts are in simPRO, as well the forms that go with them.”
As a result, Mark and his team now have a centralised location for all of their previously paper-based forms and contracts. This detail and complete visibility into jobs and projects in progress provide an unmatched customer experience that drives loyalty.
“Before, all of the information about our jobs and assets were spread around lots of spreadsheets, and it was just messy,” Mark said.
“For the first time ever, we’ve been able to look at the work and see how much it actually cost us, which is massive in terms of profit.”
Now in their fourth year of using simPRO in their business the team is growing from strength to strength.
“Since introducing simPRO in December 2018, we have not looked back. By developing and using all of its facets, customer satisfaction, cash flow and, above all, profits have dramatically improved.”
Want to achieve streamlined operations for better business growth like Blue Flame? Contact simPRO to find out how we can support your business.