Civil engineering company Lanes Group plc, is rolling out BigChange job management software.
Lanes adopted BigChange when Sapphire Utilities, who were already using the 6-in-1, cloud-based system, became part of the Group in 2023. Named ‘Utility Company of the Year’, Sapphire had already implemented BigChange to transform its services to organisations such as Severn Trent Water and Thames Water, reducing administration and achieving a 100 percent rise in productivity.
Leeds-based Lanes specialises in drainage and sewerage repairs.
“When we joined Lanes, it was largely expected that we, and the other organisations within the family, would continue to operate as they always had,” commented Mo Dawood, previously Director of IT at Sapphire Utility Services and now Group IT Director of Lanes. “However, once we had demonstrated the positive impact that BigChange had on our contracts, the decision was made to roll it out across all divisions”.
“This decision has been vindicated time and time again,” he continued. “Using BigChange within our bidding process has been fundamental in winning new work, and its use across existing projects has resulted in the award of at least one, six figure performance related bonus payment”.
Sapphire first introduced the BigChange job management system, which incorporates a mobile workforce app, customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, live tracking, financial management, and business intelligence tools in one system, on its contract with Severn Trent Water. Delivering water maintenance services on behalf of four million homes and businesses across the Midlands and mid-Wales, BigChange quickly delivered a reduction in administration and efficiency gains in the back-office and field.
The BigChange solution, which sees engineers equipped with mobile devices for real-time reporting, also helped deliver client critical milestones, manage on-street works liabilities and ensure a right first-time approach.
The adoption of BigChange on contracts across the wider Lanes Group, is ongoing, and has already resulted in an increase in the automation of routine admin and reporting tasks, the accessibility of historical job information and the transparency of work in progress. Now processing more than 500 jobs a day – a rise of 400 percent, Lanes has over 1,000 users on the BigChange system.
“Since using BigChange within the wider Lanes Group, we have been able to diversify our offering into new service areas, such as traffic management,” Dawood continued. “We built a test environment within the system, and demonstrated it to a potential customer and they were literally ‘blown away’ by the features and functionality we were offering”
