ARH Group Ltd tackle delayed reporting with Tugger and Simpro®

Who are ARH Group Ltd?

ARH Ltd is a mechanical and electrical building services company.

Founded in 1990, they are an established, and now sizeable network of multi-skilled buildings service engineers, account managers and estimators. The company’s central office is located in Shropshire, but the talented team are dispersed across every corner of the UK. This enables them to respond to several thousand jobs in any given month.

ARH’s skills, experience, and business systems enable them to provide a one stop-shop to clients, offering services that range from electrical fixes and general maintenance to large-scale installations and refurbishments of commercial spaces.

They pride themselves of their dynamism. Their unique company structure, customer-first ethos and extensive skills, enable them to respond to clients’ requests quickly, cost effectively and with an exceptional level of service. This approach has earned them household name clients such as Travis Perkins, and a boast-worthy 90% ‘first fix’ rate.

Damian Winstone is ARH’s Commercial Business Partner. We caught up with Damian to discuss his data reporting journey, including why he’s using Tugger and the results he’s seeing.

The Problem: The Frustration of limited data updates

Having a network of skilled workers spread out across the United Kingdom is fantastic for offering clients fast and cost-effective solutions, however it’s not so easy to manage. The nature of service-based industries, where time is the commodity, have always thrown up a unique set of challenges, as well as the usual issues of billable time, and ensuring time is effectively used and logged, ARH were faced with the challenge of being able to distribute their team as required as quickly as possible and to ensure that time is profitably utilised and that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with clients are met.

To manage this complex network of data, ARH were using Power BI alongside a tool called Trimble. Damian comments “I’d written all the reports from scratch myself and it was linked to static data sources, we couldn’t get the data we needed out of the system. We knew we had more up-to-date data than what we were seeing. We needed to have live data with regular updates. The actual reporting was fine, but it was the data sources that we had issues with.”

Damian switched his job management software from Trimble to Simpro. When he did this, he explored his data reporting options. “Simpro has BI reporting functionality, but it’s limited.”

The Solution: How using Tugger alongside Simpro changed the game

Why Tugger? Damien knew ARH needed to move away from their current tech set up. “We switched to Tugger because we were using Simpro and we knew that Tugger integrated Simpro data with Power BI. We found this out through Google searches because we knew none of the systems we were already working with offered anything like Tugger. I looked through heaps of different solutions and case studies and I choose Tugger. I wanted to work with a trusted UK-based company of the right size. There are some large American corporations offering integration with Power BI but my preference was a British company.”

“Plus, a big selling point for ARH is that we’re a reasonably sized company so we can absolutely compete with large-scale competition, but we’re also small enough to care and we offer a personal service. We wanted a provider with the same ethos, a company with more than two employees but one that wasn’t so big that when I needed support I’d be put through to a call centre of 200 plus employees.”

What about Data Reports? Damian was also keen to enjoy an end to-end solution that didn’t require too much input from him or other members of the ARH team. As well as connecting Simpro data with Power BI, Tugger comes with a suite of pre-build reports. These reports have been developed based on the type of reporting most Simpro users need to see.

“You’re not starting from scratch with Tugger [due to pre-built reports] which is important because getting data out of the business is one thing, but the report building is a whole other area. Tugger does both.”

The Results: Data dreamland?

For Damian the fact that Tugger extracts the data from Simpro and injects it into Power BI, and that he has access to pre-built reports as part of the package means that Tugger has provided the solution he was looking for.

“We have our data and we’re able to actually work with it, it’s a simple as that, once it’s set up, it just works in the background. We’ve now got Management Information reporting throughout the business and we’re seeing live dashboards, the gaps are now filled.”

One of Damian’s concerns with his old setup was that he knew the data wasn’t always showing an up-to-date picture. Damian had this to say about his new setup, “Tugger has given us a better view of what’s happening in the business throughout the working day, rather than waiting until reports come out at the end of the week, so we can react quicker.”

What is different about Tugger? Damian was most impressed with Tugger’s UK-based support.

“The support and knowledge from the team exceeded expectations. When we’ve had queries or concerns. Tugger have always looked into it and come back with either a reason or a solution. We’re very happy with Tugger.

“Craig and Gabor in particular are very helpful, even when some of my questions aren’t strictly related to Tugger, they still take the time to share their viewpoints. And because they deeply understand our data, and the industry, this support is valuable. The team have even helped us understand Simpro better.”

Damian was also happy with the straightforward, no nonsense nature of the product. The one word he used to describe Tugger? “Straightforward. It doesn’t sound very spectacular but it’s true. It’s a simple set-up for getting your data and being able to report straight away. Even if you’ve got no Power BI knowledge, you can get up and running with Power BI reporting. There’s a lot of very complex stuff going on in the background and Tugger just makes it simple.”