One of our biggest goals at VTI is to improve consistency and accountability. Before Q360, there were a lot of inconsistencies in how each department operated from office to office; this was a long-standing issue. Q360 gave us a great tool to be able to identify those inconsistencies, and we use it in a way that allows us all to be on the same page.
Bonnie Carpenter is the Q360 Administrator at VTI Security. “I am the liaison between our VTI colleagues and the Q360 support staff, so I submit all of our calls and then work with the Solutions360 Team on various initiatives. I also work with our IT team to test all our customizations, roll out new procedures, and manage them over time.”
“We have a very organized structure at VTI,” says Carpenter. “I think that has helped us immensely to understand the Q360 platform in a deeper way. My role at VTI is really facilitating that organization. Anytime someone has a question with Q360 they submit it to me and we work through it.”
Often, the resolution involves teaching and education, “The highlight videos that are on the Help content give these quick, but very thorough, lessons. These have been really outstanding for us.”
One of the biggest changes since Q360, is the increased visibility, according to Carpenter. “We can see individual contribution, which makes everyone very accountable. The reports allow us to monitor performance in a very qualitative and quantitative way, and compare it against our processes. This has enabled us to create consistency and predictability across all our offices.”
“We worked with Solutions360 to tailor our reports to how we wanted to measure efficiency,” says Carpenter. “The reports are separated out for administration time, time spent on sales opportunities and the pre-sale time, to really get a granular look at that efficiency of all our colleagues.”
Since Q360, colleagues at VTI are, on average, 10 to 15 percent more efficient, and many processes are no longer duplicated.
Before, the sales team would enter their bid into one system, but the same information had to be re-entered into another piece of software, just so accounting could look at it. Then the service team was working out of another system and loading inboxes with thousands of emails.
“But now, we have a centralized location for all our data, and we are much more efficient,” Carpenter reports. “With Q360, we are able to better communicate with each other, and in a more open way.”
VTI’s CMO recently developed a project manager ranking system within Q360 in order to measure efficiency. He looks at four different factors for a project manager:
- How many Internal Change Orders or Customer Change Orders did they book?
- Did they increase or decrease the profit?
- What was the budget for the change?
- How many projects did they close over a certain period of time?
“All of these numbers can be pulled from the profit tab,” notes Carpenter. “He reviews this information with project managers every quarter.”
“The ability to measure performance like this comes from having an immense amount of data at our disposal. We never had this level of information available before, company-wide, right at our fingertips.”
“Really, my job is speeding up as Solutions360 continues to develop the platform, which is happening at a pretty fast pace,” says Carpenter. “We have so much data, and we keep learning what to do with it, how to read it, and leverage it to really transform our business.”
