Case Studies

P3Works

Background

P3Works administers tax special districts for municipalities.

Issue

It was no surprise to us that there are many moving parts managing projects for municipalities. For the past few years, P3Works had been tracking all the meetings, deadlines, contract negotiations, regulations, documents, and legal requirements with the use of spreadsheets and project managers. That is a lot of overhead. What was worse, the overhead appeared to grow faster than the number of projects - doubling the number of projects seemed to require four times as much project management to keep everyone on track. Business growth for P3Works was limited by a lack of scalability.

Solution

Dialogs has replaced all of the shared spreadsheets and email threads with a unified, database-driven dashboard that tracks project steps, deadlines, team member tasks and agendas, and much more. It also provides a repository for communication archives and essential documents. This was a significant change in procedure for P3Works, but Dialogs has assisted with the transition by providing training and documentation.

Outcome

The P3Works project management application has been live for only a couple weeks, but their team is already comfortable with the transition away from spreadsheet chaos. Timelines and events are being consistently updated so project reports are continuously up-to-date.

Bickford Senior Living

Background

Bickford operates over 50 senior living centers throughout the Midwest and the South.

Issue #1

Bickford produces many different printed materials for each branch location including menus, rack brochures, newsletters, direct mail pieces, etc. Each branch has their own name and personality, and Bickford wanted each branch to have personalized materials. Bickford had two full-time marketing staff dedicated to manually producing localized collateral for all locations. 

Solution #1

Dialogs worked with Bickford to speed up the process of making personalized print collateral for each branch. Dialogs deployed EZversion brand management software to automate the personalization process.

Bickford's collateral catalog has hundreds of templates. New templates are created and added to the catalog  by Bickford staff, with specified content areas made editable by branch users. Because their corporate staff can easily create new templates, they now offer their branches more collateral options than ever before.

Outcome #1

Today, one person spends less than one day per week on personalization. The EZversion automation provided by Dialogs saved Bickford the equivalent of nearly two full-time headcounts.

In addtion, we were able to help Bickford reduce printing costs by routing print prodution for all locations to a single commercial printer, which allowed them to negotiate volume pricing.

Bickford chose to not reduce the size of their staff. The time they saved is now spent on expanded marketing efforts, generating more revenue for the company.

Issue #2

Bickford has a collection of siloed software products that each did a different task. Employees had to log in to each application and deal with a different set of workarounds to make the various apps do what they needed. All of these apps were costing Bickford in time and license fees.

Solution #2

Dialogs engineered and built a consolidated system. We built segments in order of which existing apps were most expensive or least effective. We started with a CRM tool that allowed them to easily track the process of converting a lead into a prospect and then a resident. Those leads are generated through their own marketing efforts as well as referral relationships. Next we built a resident assessment system that allowed them to track the health issues of each resident. We also built a tool for tracking the resident care events that affected billing and care requirements. The system now also includes an employee training and tracking program and a survey system that regularly seeks feedback from customers and employees. Employee performance reviews are managed and analyzed for each location and company-wide.

Outcome #2

Bickford now runs a single application that is precisely mirrors how they run their business. They have eliminated many of the separate license fees. The survey system has increased overall customer satisfaction ratings by over 15% and improved employee morale. The training program has been a key component to Bickford's ability to acquire senior living centers and rapidly improve their operations to Bickford's high standard of care.

Rural Water Impact

Rural water districts are required to have a website. Many of these districts have little budget to work with, so compliance of this requirement was a challenge.

RWI solves that problem. By providing websites as an online service, water districts can have new, contemporary websites with no upfront costs. Dialogs built and maintains the service for RWI to keep all websites current and worry-free.

The  national association of water districts recently endorsed RWI as their preferred provider of websites for their members.

Read more about Rural Water Impact at www.RuralWaterImpact.com.

Plustar

Plustar sells tape products B2B. They offer every tape and adhesive 3M, Intertape, and several other manufacturers make. Offering 35,000 SKUs online creates many challenges. They also wanted a customer portal that would make viewing past order and invoices possible and streamlining reorders. Since they are B2B, they also wanted a managed purchase order process for approved customers.

Here are a few problems we solved over the course of this project:

Product Photography – If you have a few dozen products in your catalog, you probably haven't considered photo uploading to be much of an issue. If it takes you 30 seconds to open the product record, find the correct photo, upload it to the server, and then save, it would take you an hour or two to upload you entire collection of product photos. With 35,000 SKUs, Plustar was facing a much bigger challenge – one person, full time, 7-8 weeks. We added a photo management dashboard that quickly tags products as related so they can share photos, plus we rendered all various image sizes needed by the design. The entire image library upload took a couple days.

Quantity Discounts – Reduced pricing for large orders are an essential part of working B2B. We built a pricing dashboard that applies a complex formula to the wholesale cost, automatically setting the each prices as well as four quantity breaks for all 35,000 SKUs. Plustar can see which SKUs fall above or below a specified threshold, plus they can manually adjust prices at each of five levels of product categorization.

Data Integration and Customer Portal – For customers to see their account data, we had to integrate with Plustar's existing accounting system, a custom AS400 software package that the company had been using for many years. It had never been written to integrate with a website, and the original software developers didn't think it could be done. We did.

Mobile Sales Rep Support – An additional integration with the internal AS400 software is used by sales reps to access customer records while in the field. Reps can easily plan their day in the field, significantly increasing the number of sales calls each rep makes per day. The system includes enhanced security measures to ensure the safety of customer data.

Premier Trailer Leasing

Background

Premier Trailer Leasing leases over-the-road trucking trailers - from small independent trucking companies to large corporate logistics departments.

Issue

When Premier first contacted Dialogs, they were starting an expansion program by acquiring small, independent trailer leasing companies. Every company they acquired had its own system for tracking inventory and other business activity. Premier needed a way to manage their entire multi-location operation across the country.

Solution

Dialogs worked with Premier to thoroughly document all the data points that were important to managing their overall operation. We created a cloud-based system that captured countless data points about Premier's business. The system managed the business arrangement between Premier and their customers, from the lease itself to insurance to invoices. The robust inventory system tracked more than just the units held by each location - we also logged GPS data for trailers, calculated tire wear and tire replacement, managed damage reports from checkout walkarounds to returns, assisted with equipment transfers between locations, and provided numerous reports for individual rental units to each location's overall performance. There were tiers of access to information including customers and their drivers who could access their lease and insurance paperwork, location managers that could see all available data about units leased from their location, and corporate admins who could analyze individual locations as well as company-wide activity.

Outcome

We have worked with Premier for nearly eight years. During that time, they increased their inventory nearly tenfold, significantly increased revenue, and improved profitability. The success of their expansion resulted in the sale of the company, which was one of their original business objectives. We have continued to work with Premier to assist them in their transition into the new owner's existing systems.