Cloud Computing - NIST Definition

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

What Leongatha Refrigeration say

25% increase in billable hours due to IMS

Built by a trady for tradies

IMS got us organised

Always up to date

“I-Man’s support is invaluable, couldn’t fault it"

Built by a trady for tradies

That ‘s what Teresa from Leongatha Refrigeration says. She’s right! The key reason why IMS works so well is that Guy Arrowsmith the director of I-MAN, has a background in the trade. He has worked first hand as a plumber and knows the needs of the industry from the perspective of employee and employer.

IMS works alongside you, tracking your business processes so you don’t have to stress about it. “Taking the time to implement IMS to its full potential is the key”, says Theresa. If you invest in the initial outlay and take the time to train up staff and link it into your existing accounting packages, IMS will change your business process and allow you to do what you do best....

IMS goes Green

The current trend for many companies is to make the shift towards a greener approach to business practice. Leongatha Refrigeration is no exception. Offering renewable and sustainable options for their clients, they believe that in-house business practice should reflect their green approach.

IMS plays a large role in moving towards a paperless office. A fully automated system ensures that staff can receive jobs, log hours and order stock all online. Back ups are made off site and the need for the print out of documentation is only occasional.

Saving a tree or two every year by using IMS is certainly a step forward in responsible business practice. However, the benefits of accessing your entire business online, being able to check orders, cash flow, stock and staff at the click of a button has more advantages than just being green! Reduced phone bills are just one!

IMS gets cool with Leongatha Refrigeration

The suspicion that your billable hours are not as much as they should be haunts many business owners. Let’s face it, that alone can make or break you! Tracking hours is a difficult process for any service-based business. Attempting to recall hours at the end of the working day or worse still at the end of the week, inevitably results in inaccuracy. More often than not, a very conservative estimate of chargeable hours ends up costing your business.

For Leongatha Refrigeration, the implementation of IMS has resulted in at least 25% revenue increase due solely to more accuracy in tracking billable hours.

Although according to Theresa Doohan, productivity was not the only motivating factor for implementing IMS. The business organisational process for Leongatha Refrigeration had become difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis. More and more time was being invested in paperwork when time in business development and strategy was being lost. Barb Sauvarin, business manager for Leongatha Refrigeration, sums it up; “IMS got us organised”. No more loose job cards and pieces of paper, everything is automated and organised. Business process for Leongatha Refrigeration.... it’s a breeze.

Cloudstorming IMS Style

There is a new kind of storm brewing in the IT world and IMS is at the eye of the storm. This IT revolution transforms the way we think about our business hardware requirements. IMS does not require highend servers or regular software upgrades. We rely on just one element in your business, an internet connection.

Save yourself a packet and see the benefits of our business management tool that is based in an online cloud environment. It’s an IT revolutionary concept and we are proud to offer cutting edge technology that is effective and most importantly cost savvy.

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Slash your tax bills with IMS!

IMS can be used as a marketing tool to help win valuable new business. The end of year tax time is one of the peak stress times in any business. Paperwork that lies un-entered since January, lost invoices and chargeable hours that have never been logged, one big disaster.

The worst-case scenario is that you back up the trailer and load paperwork liberally, spin it round to the accountant and watch your money fall out the back as your accountant breaks into a cold sweat. Organisation is the key to minimising your tax and accounting fees. Organisation also ensures you are in the best position to make last minute smart tax decisions.

IMS is the ultimate weapon against office chaos! Taking the time to set up IMS properly ensures that you get the best out of it. It will save you a bucket of time and stress at the end of each financial year.

Using IMS to its full capacity means, you have logged every hour both billable and non- billable for the whole financial year. You can track profit and loss on individual staff, monitor stock and control your finances with instant updates on your net position. Utilising the company diagnostic features you can run full reports at anytime from anywhere to know exactly where you stand.

No longer does the end of financial year need to be a huge stress. Call I-Man now if you need additional assistance to get your IMS working to peak performance. A little work now will save you weeks of pain and lost income later on.

IMS at work for Advantage Plumbing

Jason Tait, director of Advantage Plumbing has cleared his desk of a paperwork nightmare and vows never to go back to his life before IMS came to the office.

“It’s been an easy change “says Jason and within 24 hours of his sign up with i-man, customer service relations manager Bradley Bristow-Stagg, was on the phone walking him through the process.

Trialling the system first with one staff member and truck, Jason was so impressed that within 2 weeks all staff and vehicles were transitioned onto the new system. Customised for Advantage Plumbing, IMS has revolutionised his business and substantially increased his revenue.

Not only can Jason now track jobs from the initial enquiry through to invoicing, compliance and stock can be tracked and accounted for. “The biggest benefit”, Jason says, “is the turnaround in revenue”. Previous issues of unaccounted hours and unhappy clients due to complicated office process, are now eliminated and as a result revenue has increased. No more lost paperwork or complicated systems, everything is managed by IMS.

Knowing his business can be contained and managed anywhere, anytime by IMS, Jason now has the capability to manage large contracts that once were logistically impossible. Procurement of goods to site, staffing movements, JSA requirements, OH&S and invoicing can now be done as a seamless and interrelated task rather than hours of labour intensive paperwork.

Jason is now enjoying more home time with family and friends as he knows he can log into the office at any time to check on job progress or attend to invoices without towing home the filing cabinet first!

Creating & Receiving Service Work

Creating & Receiving Service Work “Flexible Ways to Receive Your Work Orders”

Our field service software provides flexible ways to create or receive jobs, including:

• Via the IMS web service management interface.
• From system generated emails sent by the customer.
• Automatically generated from periodic or routine schedules.
• Through the IMS web based client service interface
• Directly from site via the mobile field service interface.

IMS provides flexibility on how your service management system can be used, opening up the options of remote computing for your admin personnel and reducing the need for an office to be occupied during business hours.

More info go to www.i-man.com.au

Service Web Page

IMS Field Service Software “Service Management Excellence”
IMS Field Service software takes service management to a new level with a system that is simple enough to user for non-technical people yet powerful enough to streamline workflow and provide significant improvements to back end efficiency, productivity, cash flow and bottom line profits.

Taking The Plunge

One of the big advantages with IMS is how fast you can get up and going. Most of our new customers take advantage of this and start gaining the benefits almost immediately. One recent example of this is a plumbing company in Canberra who had their 10 field staff interacting with the system within a week of deciding to go ahead.

While our success stories far out weigh the companies who are slow on the uptake we still have a number who find it hard to get going despite significant improvements in our documentation and customer service.

So why does it happen and is there anymore i-man can do to help?

The main problem we are seeing is that companies or key personnel are not committed to change. The situation is made worse when only half hearted attempts are made to implement the system. This leads a breakdown in information workflow because only some people are using it, reducing the benefit the system.

Alan Quinn from Project Relocations was one such case. The company runs a team of riggers who specialize in relocation of electrical equipment, Switchboards, generators etc. Envisaging riggers entering daily job sheet information into a PDA was difficult for them to get their head around.

Project Relocations first implemented IMS in September 2008 but they hardly used the system until March 2009. Alan new they were missing out big time on chargeable hours and finally committed to using IMS properly, they have not looked back since.

The business reality for anyone who has workers in the field is that if you can not streamline your information flow between the office and the field it will be costing you time and money, lots of it!

The tangible benefits were significant and immediate but they noticed intangible benefits as well. Alan recently had a customer ask for a break up of hours and crane rates for a job. "I called him back a few minutes later and gave them to him, he could not believe it. He was expecting me to get back to him in a couple of weeks, and this left a very positive impression with our customer".

There is little i-man can do to speed up the implementation process if the commitment is not there from the company. You need to ask yourself what it is costing you in time and money if you do not commit.

IMS – Now with GPSTrack

IMS now has a solution to fill the gap between efficient job management and the benefits of GPS tracking by integrating GPS capabilities into the job management system. Using the latest technology, IMS is now able to capture a users coordinates and record them with job information.

The information can be used to verify when and where information was recorded and assist in locating personnel for scheduling purposes. This also improves the speed of creating efficient job runs by scheduling jobs nearest to each other or to a field workers last known position, helping to minimise travel and optimising time spent on productive work.

The need for scheduling can further be reduced as field staff can find the nearest un-assigned job to their current position from their PDA, without calling the office or being scheduled to a job.

The system can be used with most PDA / Smart phones on the market but is more accurate with devices that have a built in GPS chip, no other hardware is required.

Initial implementation of GPS capabilities into IMS has focused on the job management functions but will in the future incorporate other areas like locating suppliers and recording when and where compliance forms were completed.

IMS GPSTrack provides a cost effective solution that integrates into the existing job management system, providing the ability to verify when and where forms have been completed and locating field staff. This will assist in improving visibility without a costly GPS system that some employees may feel intrusive.

Effects of Eliminating Paperwork

In November 2006 Velocity Electrical, a small electrical contracting business with 5 employees, was at breaking point. Although they had plenty of work, the company was experiencing severe cash flow problems, profit was minimal, the business owner Mike Brewitt spent most of his time performing operational tasks like scheduling and paper work. He was stuck spending his time in the business and not doing business, but did not know how to you turn it around. Something had to change or it did not make sense continuing.

Mike began searching for a solution and came across IMS, a web based job and compliance management system that allows the field staff to receive and update job information in real time, eliminating paperwork and streamlining work flow. After seeing a demonstration of the system he jumped at it.

“I had been looking for a while, this was different to other systems I had seen and I felt it was something that could solve my problem”, says Mike.
Mike went about setting up IMS with the enthusiasm of someone first starting a business. The implementation of Velocity Electrical was one of the fastest i-man had ever done, their field staff were using it within 3 days and the benefits flowed from there.

The results were amazing, they were able to get through much more work and their billable hours increased from an average of 30 to 35-40 hours per employee per week. In the office, the results were even better. They currently estimate it is saving them around 20 hours a week in admin time and invoices are getting sent out as the work is completed.

The net benefit is that cash flow position, revenue and profit significantly improved, not to mention their quality of life for people in the business. Mike’s time is now free to chase new opportunities; he is now working on the business rather than in it.

i-man continues to develop IMS, working closely with their customers to identify what functions need to be added that can help streamline things even further. Recent improvements include better support for projects, automatic conversion of emails into jobs and adding some powerful reports that can assist with performance monitoring and prioritising work.

For more information go to www.i-man.com.au

New Features To Save More Time?

Automatic conversion of email into IMS jobs!
If you have customers who send you jobs via email you now have the option to have them automatically converted into IMS tasks saving you time re-keying data. The function requires a standard email format so that text can be mapped to the correct fields in IMS. It can convert directly from email content or from work orders attached to an email. IMS support staff will assist setting up 1 email format for each of our customers, standard rates apply for setting up additional formats.

In other development news, work is progressing steadily on the new estimating/quotation module and we should have a release date within the next month. The new module has been designed with significant input from our customer base and will provide more flexibility in formatting quotes and speed up the estimating process.

How is your Service business performing

In confronting the challenging business environment we are now in, companies need to closely monitor their trading position to ensure cashflow and productivity is kept at an optimum. Losing out on billable hours, delays in invoicing and poor job management will cost you money and affect customer retention.

Companies who have maximized the benefits of IMS have used it to control and improve these areas of their business, many with some dramatic results. To provide further support in these areas of your business, we have produced a new report called 'Company Diagnostic' to summarise the current status of key performance indicators.

The Company Diagnostic report gives you a single view to show job throughput, productive hours vs non productive hours and the dollar value of closed jobs that have not been invoiced. It also gives you the cost of jobs in the report period vs the value invoiced for the same period.

Missing out on billing one hour a week will reduce your annual revenue by over $3,500 a year, so it is important to ensure you maximise your return on your labour. The IMS benchmark is 100% return on labour, that is a company that was a losing out on 25 hours a week across five technicians prior to implementation. How is your business performing?

The Company Diagnostic can be found under the invoicing tab in the reports menu.


www.i-man.com.au

Who Uses IMS Service Software

Companies who adopted IMS service software have identified issues that were affecting their company's viability, these include:

• Collection & collating job information for invoicing and timesheets is resource intensive affects cashflow, efficicency and profitability.
• Inaccurate or non billing of jobs = lost revenue.
• Poor access to information = Operational issues managing field personnel and affecting service delivery.
• Having difficulty managing and controlling compliance leaving company exposed.
• Poor delivery of service and lack of systems effecting customer retention and winning new business.
• Time spent managing the business effecting business operators personall lives.

Service software can run on iPhones http://www.i-man.com.au/software/iphone-service-software.cfm

What is IMS Service Software

IMS is a web based service software solution that supports job and compliance management. It enables you to communicate with your mobile workforce in real time eliminating paperwork and streamlining work flow dramatically improving efficiency and profitability.

More information can be found at http://www.i-man.com.au