HVAC – operations, compliance and workforce management

Case Study: VSS

How VSS use BORIS for HVAC

Here we interviewed our HVAC client VSS to discuss their experience of using BORIS in their business operations.

They explain how they use BORIS to support their HVAC services – such as ventilation system maintenance, fire damper installation and kitchen extract cleaning – in order to be more efficient in their operations and compliant in their service delivery.

“Since we started working with the BORIS software, we’ve developed it, we made bespoke forms for our staff. It allows everybody to work in the same way, it allows the business to look at a huge amount of data and analyse that. And we’ve found them to be a very flexible, friendly business partner.

We view them as a business partner. We don’t see ourselves as a customer, we’ve worked together with Boris and if we have an idea they work with us to develop a solution and it’s been beneficial since we’ve been working with them for over 5 years now.”

From health & safety documentation to workforce management, watch our short video to see the full case study.

Case Study:
Who are VSS?

“VSS clean and maintain ventilation systems, fire dampers and ductwork. We employ about 50-60 site based engineers and they are out in the field undertaking those works and collecting statutory information for our customers. We use the BORIS software solution for of all those field engineers, along with planning our work.”

Who uses BORIS in your business?

“We employ about 85 staff at the moment and every member of staff uses BORIS, either for their daily function, expenses, timesheets. So everyone within the business is a user of the BORIS platform.”

How does BORIS support your business?

“Primarily, the core features from a reporting point of view are fire dampers, kitchen extract cleaning reports, ductwork cleaning reports, fire door inspection templates; they’re our main output reports. But, also, every member of staff uses the timesheet function, on a daily basis. We use it for our health & safety documentation as well, and for people doing daily tasks like vehicle inspection sheets each day, signing off on their method statements risk assessments. So it’s used by every user in different ways every day.”

What led you to look for a solution?

“We generate a lot of site based information, lots of images, lots of data fields for the work that we do so we used to do that via Excel, Word functions. It was quite manual and took a lot of admin so we were looking for a way to streamline that process, save us time and increase our turnaround times for customers on reports. So we started looking for business systems and we were introduced to BORIS through a customer that used BORIS for their site.

It was a recommendation, we spoke with BORIS and we went from there. We built some bespoke templates for our business and it’s just grown from that point and works well for us. We used to employ 3 people to be doing our reports with only about 30 to 40 engineers, now we have more like 50 to 60 engineers every day and we only have one person operating the report functionality and it’s sped up our reporting time for our customers as well.”

What does it mean for your customers?

“I think there’s several benefits. We get repeatability on our reporting, so the reports all output in the same way so we’re collecting that same information for clients across multiple sites, all the templates are familiar to them, and they’re familiar to our staff. We can turnaround reports quicker, generally we like to turn reports around within 3-5 days for our customers which sounds difficult, but with the software all the information is there the minute it’s been done so, essentially, we could do it the next day, or even the same day, but we want to quality assure the reports. All of those things are beneficial for the customers, and our business as well.”

What’s next?

“There’s a lot more we could get from BORIS than we actually already get and we’re looking to get better at using the software to help the business more. But somethings are very useful, like, we can do some time and motion studies, how long does it take us to test, or clean, or inspect different items, we can look into assets on different sites more. There’s a lot more already built into BORIS than we’re already utilising and we need to get better at doing that because that will help our business even more in the future.”

For more information on using BORIS to support workforce management click here