Tell Us About a Typical Day
My typical day as a supervisor involves handling anything that comes in the four walls here at the branch. This could be anything from our parts department, our field service team, our in-shop services, or anything with the sales department.
Tell Us About Your Shop’s Safety Culture
Safety is number one, hands down. The safety concerns we have here are universal for the market we are in. We’re dealing with heavy equipment both in the shop and actually in the field service side of the business, along with power generation. What we touch and what we handle is a safety concern every day. Our goal is to make sure our employees that are out there are doing the tasks needed safely.
How Does Anvl Play A Part in Your Day
So the safety processes we had here prior to Anvl was on paper. Employees filled out any safety concerns they had going into a repair on a paper form. A lot of it was just tracking if they were actually writing it down on a paper and filing each one properly at the end of the day.
We’d have to pull the employees from the field service in and go over the forms, how to fill it out, what we’re looking for.
Introducing the tablets and the Anvl product to the branch was a shocker for a lot of the employees. They were used to the typical forms of handwriting them and not using the electronic version. However, the onboarding was very smooth. I thought we’d have a lot of employees kicking back and challenging the new process. But after we rolled it out and brought them in and showed them what the tablet and Anvl product could do, they picked it up pretty quickly.
Before implementation, I was a little nervous. We have some older employees that aren’t used to change, they try to fight the change and they’re gonna do it the way they’ve done it for so many years. So my thought was that a lot of employees were gonna kick back and challenge the change that we were going through.
After we went through the training, after we were doing the development, they saw the benefit of it and saw how user-friendly it was, it made it a lot smoother than I thought it was going to be.
Anvl is now a part of our daily routine for every job that an employee goes on. It’s a repetition where all the employees understand the expectations that this is going to be done prior to every job and we are seeing value in the outcome of using the software.
Communication is Key
Anvl helps with communication within the shop because they have the opportunity to flag an assessment. So if there’s something that they want to bring to management’s attention, they have the opportunity to flag it, and with Anvl Insights, as a manager, I can see that.
Each morning I come in, I’ll pull up Insights and see if there are any jobs that were flagged from the previous day, where I can then go out and talk to the employee, “Hey, what did you experience? What were you up against? How did you combat that challenge? And what did you do to get the job done?”
Anvl has changed the way we manage team accountability. We have the opportunity with the Anvl product to see who’s performing that process prior to every job. If we have a gap in someone not doing it, we’re having that conversation to find out, “What were you working on? Why did you choose not to utilize the tools for your safety?” And we try to make it personal to them and what they’re doing.
The Anvl products allow us to identify ways to get better and ways to do things more safely each and every day. My ultimate goal is for each employee to take a timeout, step back, look at what they’re about to perform and find any safety concerns. I mean, as long as they’re taking the time to look at the environment, look at their surroundings, look at what they’re going into and help mitigate any safety issues prior to going into the job, that’s what I’m looking for. It will help my team go home each and every day.
Anvl in Action
So we had a situation where the generator was located, probably about 30 yards away from where they could park and they had to carry a load bank over to that job. We tried to come up with a different cart system to allow them to safely move that load bank over to the job site based on the feedback we were seeing in the Anvl reports. So it helps with the field service technicians to get a different look at each job site that they’re going up against.
The Anvl team has been nothing but helpful on the support. I challenged some of the support systems that they put in place and I’ve actually tested them out personally with calling them after hours, texting them after hours, sending them emails after hours and I always get a response. There hasn’t been one request that I’ve put in that I haven’t gotten a phone call back, an email back or any form of communication to address the issues that we’re experiencing to get those resolved and move forward.
What I’m looking forward to with Anvl is what the future brings. How can we impact our employees more to recognize safety concerns and get those addressed? The communication that the Anvl product allows is for those technicians, either in the shop or in the field, to have a direct path to management. And the technology allows clear tracking of outstanding concerns. This product is going to continue to allow us to understand the scenarios our techs are put in and allow our management to adapt and improve our techniques so everyone is doing every job, safely.
Interested in learning more about how our technicians are using Anvl every day? Request a demo here.
