Apps as Intuitive as a Shovel
“Apps as intuitive as a shovel” – how Fulton Hogan and UiRevolution put data in the hands of 8000 workers
It’s 2 am at the side of a quiet city street in New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland. A mobile road maintenance crew from infrastructure and construction company Fulton Hogan is tidying up after making their third road repair of the shift. It’s one of half a dozen cracks and potholes the crew will deal with across the city before the morning commuter traffic takes over and the crew signs off for the night.
As the rest of the crew packs away their tools and safety gear, the supervisor makes a few quick taps on her iPad.
Before she starts the truck to drive to the next job, the job details are completed in Fulton Hogan’s daily job management system (eDJR), which then updates each worker’s timesheet.
It’s all part of a technology ecosystem that saves the company thousands of hours and millions of dollars each year.
Seven years ago, the process couldn’t have been more different. Each week, 4500 workers would turn in their paper timesheets, which eventually made their way to payroll who would manually enter every timeband worked into Fulton Hogan’s payroll system.
“The decision to digitize the process”, says Digital Manager Amanda Lawrey, “was a simple one”. “Processing Timesheets was a very manual and time-consuming process. At the same time, smartphones and apps were becoming ubiquitous and we saw the potential for building a completely new solution on the Salesforce platform that integrated with our other systems.”
Auckland app developers UIRevolution joined the project soon after, led by developer and cofounder Srini Munagala. Working closely with Amanda and the Fulton Hogan team, they leveraged the Salesforce SDK to make Fulton Hogan’s vision of paperless, real-time job tracking a reality.
“What I love about working with Srini and the team is their commitment to get the job done, and their ability to think differently to solve the many challenges that were faced along the way – even if it takes a completely new approach,” says Amanda.
That first app – continually updated and still in use today – confirmed Fulton Hogan’s belief that moving data to the front line was the way to go, and since then they’ve worked with UIRevolution to develop an entire suite of iOS apps connecting to Salesforce.
And how to aggregate all the data those apps were generating?
“Simple,” says Srini. “We built a custom user interface on top of Salesforce.com that gives the Fulton Hogan team exactly the information they want in the format they want. That’s another real timesaver and all done using the tools that Salesforce has baked in.”
Today, Fulton Hogan has more than 8000 staff using 20+ mobile apps to help run its business, most of them developed by UiRevolution on the Salesforce platform. Their success can be attributed to having a clear vision and a strong focus on the end-user experience and designing apps that are as intuitive to use as a shovel.
Amanda Lawrey, Digital Manager - Fulton Hogan, Srini co-founder at UiRevolution & Christopher Styrdom, Digital Enterprise Architect - Fulton Hogan.
