Gilles Morel, Gaïa's Administrative and Financial Director, answers our questions on the benefits of Techtime for his company, and the impact of Techtime on the company's day-to-day operations.
Created in 2017, Gaïa is an HVAC company, which installs heat pumps and ventilation systems, and also acts as a design office. The company's customers are mainly professionals, including retailers, bank branches, insurance companies and office premises, including a building in the La Défense district.
Although Gaïa can operate nationwide, this 25-employee company operates mainly in the northeast quarter of France, and has two branches: in Paris and Lille.
Gilles Morel, Administrative and Financial Director at Gaïa, talks about how Techtime can meet his company's needs and challenges.
Gilles Morel: Our main problem was the distribution of schedules. We used to create one table per week in Excel, which we then extracted in PDF format and sent to the team leaders, who then relayed them to the technicians.
But these tables remain fixed and we have to deal with a schedule that is bound to change a lot, like emergencies that have to be dealt with.. This was not at all practical. For example, I didn't have all the feedback I needed for assignments as they went along. If I called a team with a problem, the technicians sometimes couldn't intervene because they were 50 km away.
So we were looking for a solution that would allow us to distribute information a little more simply and to have better visibility.
The other problem was also to find a solution to find an additional solution to the problem of increasing the number of hours worked.. Technicians used to fill in paper forms and send them in the form of photos. This meant a lot of data entry work.
Gilles Morel: We were looking for solutions while avoiding "gas factory" applications that offer too many things. I'm thinking of technicians in the field: you don't want to give them a tool that's too complex to use because the more time they spend filling in information, the less they'll want to do it.
My assistant and I worked on this for 2 or 3 months, and we came up with 3 or 4 applications. In her opinion, Techtime best met our needs. And that was my first impression too.
From there, we did a few tests and talked to the Techtime teams, who explained all the features to us. And it was all in line with what we were looking for, it corresponded to the philosophy we were looking for.
Gilles Morel: We officially launched Techtime on Monday January 2, 2023. So it's very recent. For the time being, we're still in the familiarization and discovery phase. The technicians have taken to it more easily than I imagined. Everyone's on board, and it's going pretty well.
Overall, the tool meets our needs, especially for time reporting and scheduling. Everyone can see where the teams are and what work is in progress. This gives us better visibility, and in real time, because as soon as we modify an element, the technicians concerned are notified directly via their mobile application.
Today, I supervise, and it's the team leaders who do the planning, on Saturdays or Sundays, for the week, on theweb application. Then, of course, we adapt in real time.
There's another interesting feature: if we need to call out to a specific customer that our employees don't know, we simply enter the customer's details and the address is directly attached. This can avoid the need for exchanges, text messages and the like.. For me, this is one of the bonuses.
Gilles Morel: Personally, Techtime is going to save me a lot of time, because up until now, I had to systematically prepare schedules myself. It can save save an hour on the days when we prepare the schedules.
Above all, I believe that Techtime will offer us more fluidity in the exchange of information. This ease of use and fluidity are results that both I and the technicians are looking forward to.
For example, personally, I'm the relay. At national level, everything passes through me at one time or another. So I receive calls from our various customers, and I need to know where the teams are, so that I can arrange for them to travel. On several occasions, technicians have told me that they couldn't travel because their regional manager had sent them out on an emergency, to reinforce a team that was due to close the next day.
It's this information that, in the past, was sometimes not communicated internally due to lack of time. Today, by connecting to Techtime, I can see directly, in real time, where my teams are.
And, as I said earlier, for the data entry phases, I think we're going to save time, perhaps the equivalent of half a day a month, for one person. the equivalent of half a day per month, for one person. Especially as the number of employees increases, so does the amount of data entry! We'll save ourselves a lot of tedious work.
The application fully meets my initial goal: to use a simple tool that's not a gas factory. And from that point of view, Techtime corresponds very well to my expectations.
I'd also like to mention the exchanges with the Techtime teams. I have to admit that I really appreciated this time of exchange, feedback and questions about our needs.
That's one of the little extras, because we the feeling that things can evolve according to our needs and feedback. It's not necessarily something we were looking for in the first place, because we know that's not the case everywhere. But we have had a number of exchanges with Techtime, including one just a couple of days ago. It's one of those little bonuses that's always appreciated.
