The Door Man is a commercial door service company operating in Auckland.They specialise in the service, maintenance and installation of all types of commercial doors– automatic doors and gates, fire & egress doors and all associated furniture and hardware –a very specialised field.

Managing Director, John Hannay, has five mobile Doormen servicing office buildings and body corporates throughout greater Auckland.

Trading successfully for over twelve years, John knows his business well and realised he could help his team in the field and back at the office by implementing a mobile sales solution.

The Door Man service major customers who in turn own/manage multiple sites. These customers needed a billing system that provides specific job details broken down by task, by location and by sub location.

Copies of invoices left on site often got lost and there was duplication of those invoices required, by the property management companies. John talked to Warren Tibbits at First Mobile Mt Eden about mobile business solutions. With some creative thinking, John could see that SalesLink Mobile might be the solution he was after – it had mobility, ease of operator use, connectivity with their accounting software Astarla, and an ROI that John believed achievable - on the flipside a couple of small changes in how John utilised his core accounting system were required.

The Door Man invested in SalesLink Mobile for all of their team. In their Astarla Accounting Software, customer codes were altered to become street addresses and each individual site was set up as a new customer. Using Tungsten T5’s, the mobile doormen can provide multiple input to a job and utilise Vodafone’s GPRS network to wirelessly transmit their work completed back to base. For instance, a roller door may require a check and then another serviceman would come to the job and provide parts.

In the office, Astarla posts each step of a job to its common reference number. This is a real feature for The Door Man as the specialised nature of their work can often lead to more than one serviceman providing their skills on a job. The mobile Doormen are rapt with the SalesLink Mobile solution “our servicemen love it – taken to it like a duck-to-water” said John Hannay “the blokes in the field are empowered they’ve got customer information, stock information and costings. They’re getting a buzz out of using technology”

John’s team has more than 70 years collective experience and the next project they’re tackling is to capture this collective knowledge, write an instruction book which will store this information on the handhelds.

"All job admin is done on the job, in the field, so we’re achieving this aim…” When asked about the administrative savings in his office, John said, “ I’ve saved at least half an admin person, so that’s a bonus!”

To calculate an overall ROI, some might add that “bonus” achieved by the office person plus the time saved by the serviceman, together.

Overall John said “I like SalesLink - it’s a good programme.”
The Door Man are now seeing the real benefits of SalesLink Mobile – the hardware solution originally used, proved unreliable – a change out to the Tungsten T5’s has turned this around and is providing the efficiencies the team at The Door Man were after.