Discover the Easy Way to Digitalize Your Inspection Business

Presenter: Mike Bruno, VP, Floodlight Software

July 8, 2020

Floodlight Software: Well, good morning to everyone on the call today or good afternoon, depending on where in the world you are. Thank you for joining us. We’re glad to have you for our webinar, the easy way to digitalize your inspection business. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Bruno: Thank you, Brett. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Floodlight Software: Thank you for joining us. Mike Bruno is a vice president at Floodlight Software. Today he will take you on a tour of our cloud-based inspection management platform, which was designed to help digitalize day-to-day inspection operations from the back office to the field.

Okay. take it away, Mike. 

Mike: Thank you, Brett. good morning. Good afternoon to everyone. Maybe even a good evening to some of you. As Brett mentioned, my name is Mike Bruno and I have responsibility for customer relations here at Floodlight Software, a SaaS solution company.

We’re based in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. Thank you for taking a few minutes to join us today to learn about our software platform and to see why we believe it’s the easiest way to digitalize the operations of your inspection business. So what we’re going to do today is cover a little bit of background about the tool.

Why we developed the tool. What we developed it to address. And then we’ll get into a demo of some of the key features of the system. And then we’ll wrap that up with some takeaways and get into the Q&A as Brett mentioned.

So, I’m going to start with, the fact that we’re in challenging times today. We’re all looking for ways to do more with our existing resources or in some cases, fewer resources. We believe our platform can make a significant impact on personnel efficiency and overall company productivity.

There are a lot of software tools out there that handle many of these items that challenge your business every day. And the result is often a lot of disparate systems that you use individually. Or you ultimately try to figure out integrations to how to pull it all together. One area that is particularly challenging, in the inspection space, from what we’ve learned over the years, is the fact that there are lots of different forms and regulatory requirements and standards that you must adhere to.

And, as we’ve seen with many other software tools, is that in order to deal with all of these different forms and information, you have to heavily customize the system. And, each time you make a change or add a new customer or update a form, you typically have to go back to your software company and, you know, pay for that stuff to be added to the system.

So we’ve developed our system with an integrated forms engine that’s simple to use and can, you know, functionally replicate just about any form out there and put it into a digital space so that you can use that to run your business. We do something that we call separating the data from the form.

So as you see, when you go through this, you’ll see what the technicians will be filling out. We allow them to do that in a linear fashion to quickly complete the information as they’re doing their inspections. And then when it’s all said and done, we pull that data back into exactly what you want to see it as.

So, when you look at our system, we approached it by saying, what if? So we’ve spent the last three years developing this inspection management platform.

We enlisted the support of multiple industry advisors, including Level III technicians, and much of what you see today is a result of the advisory board and a combination of us listening to our early adopter customers. We’re committed to continuous improvement of the platform and we value customers that wish to influence the roadmap and provide suggestions for feature enhancements and future items. It is a SaaS based platform. So we are going to continue to develop and add functionality over time. So we want to want it to stay extremely relevant as your business changes.

And as your business grows, all the functionality you see in this chart is in the system today. We are working on a rest API that we finished this quarter and in-app chat functions and some standard integrations to things like QuickBooks and ADP will be implemented later this year. Our system is designed to be modular with the API.

We’ll be able to push and pull data from virtually any other enterprise system. So you’ll see an end to end functionality that we built into the tool. And, you can leverage all of that or any of those, individual pieces as part of a, a bigger scope. So how does the system actually work? So we built this around, the way we, we believe that your business operations flows.

We think each job often starts with a customer request. And from there you have to do something with that request, turn it into a proposal, turn it into a quote, and then add all of the items you need for that, including, what labor is required? What equipment is going to go? What consumables are you going to need to do that job?

And from there, the system is structured to take that proposal, assuming you win the bid or win that order, and turn that into an actual work order or job. And it will bring all of the information that you built from the proposal into the actual work order. From there, it can get scheduled and dispatched electronically to technicians.

You can build teams within the system, which you’ll see, and each of the team members will get a copy of the work order with all of the information and material that goes with it. We also offer flexibility to simply create a job on the fly. So you can insert at any point in the process and just, create a job, and start the work and dispatch it from there.

Once the technicians have all of the work information, they can then execute the job digitally. They don’t have to do it on paper any longer. They can use a tablet or a laptop PC and collect all of the information that they need for the job. And this includes, you know, data sets, as well as, pictures and, or, other attachments that you want to add to the work order.

Once the job is complete, it returns back to the system for review and final analysis at which point it can then be sent to the customer and either invoiced or perform some sort of billing analysis on the actual work itself. So, let’s jump right into the demonstration and we’ll see this workflow in action.

So I’m going to start with, some basic system set up, and what you would do with the tool. It’s very simple to use and very simple to set up and extremely flexible.

So here you see, when you first enter the tool, you’re in a dashboard, which is a calendar of all your work items. And you see that every time you come into the system when you go into settings, you’ll have the ability to set up your own company email so that any documents that flow out of the tool.

Will come directly from your email address. And then of course we have all sorts of settings, including the ability to change our terminology, to batch your business workflow. So here’s an example where we’re changing the company name to customer, and, that will update, throughout the system. So you can see changes can be made, to match your business workflow.

From there, you want to jump into setting up user logins and you have complete flexibility to add users and add their roles. Each of their roles has different implications on what they can see in the system. And ultimately, as you go through set up, you’re going to add skills and rates. and we have the ability to capture both costs and prices in the system so that you can start.

To have a better understanding of what all the elements, drive, you know, your business results. Oh, we have equipment sections and consumable sections so that you can add each of these, to the jobs so that you plan accordingly. So the technicians know exactly what they bring on the job. As I mentioned before, we have the ability to create teams and add specific field users to those teams so that you can dispatch those teams all in one click.

So, with the individual field users, we allow you to basically create a profile. Wow. For them, including things like, any documentation and personnel information that you may have on them. And then their individual skills are carried throughout the system so that as you schedule a job, you will only be allowed to schedule people that have the appropriate skills for that job.

So a lot of flexibility there and quite easy to set up.

So, I told him in the beginning about forms, and the fact that forms, you know, often make it very difficult to digitalize a business because there are so many different forms you have to deal with. So we think we’ve built a really, a unique way of dealing with that, in our tool. So, everyone’s sort of familiar with these types of Excel, Word, or paper forms, that they have to deal with every day in your inspection business.

These forms, you know, change all the time. They’re varied as companies have dozens, sometimes hundreds of them. So what we do is we create job types out of them. And each one can have its own job type and you can put details on who uses it. So if you have forms that you want to assign to particular customers, you can do that.

And then what we do is we take all of the common inputs on a form, think of this as maybe the header and the footer information, and we’d build the common inputs into the system and we have the flexibility to add virtually any type of field and categorize that field so that as the technician sees it, they’ll see it as a text box or a select list or a signature box or anything of that nature.

Then we build the inspection inputs, separately, and these are the items that the technician will do over and over again. And then we have a job report. Once the job is complete, you can summarize it’s the actual work and then get signatures and things of that nature. Once we collect the data, we put it in an output form, and this is where we separate the data from the form of the data collected individually.

And then we create these output forms so that you have exactly what you want at the end of the inspection. And you can see here, the flexibility with our system. I’ll put a form generator that you can basically take any field and you can adjust all the attributes to those fields as you build the output form, associated with each job type.

And when you do that, we have neat things like section breaks and inspection sections and content sections and footers and headers associated with it. So it’s very simple to go ahead and build and change form anytime you need to. Another neat feature we’ve built in here is the “save as new” feature.

So if you have a form and you want to revise it. You don’t have to recreate the entire thing. You simply save as new, give it a new name and then, save it again, make any changes you want to it. And ultimately what you’ll see is a replica of that particular form. So we make it very simple to create and add documents to the system for use in the field by the technicians.

So once you have everything set up in the system, you get into things like adding customers. Once again, this tool has what we like to refer to as a mini CRM that allows you to keep the records of all your customers in one place. So you don’t have to search anymore. There are no longer Dropbox files for each customer that you have.

It can be set up in the system. You can add all the contacts for that customer. You can add all the site locations and you can even attach documents like contracts or terms and conditions or things of that nature. To the customer record. And then we keep a history of all the jobs that go with each of those customers.

And you can see the status of all the jobs at any given time. And then when you look at a particular job, you can see exactly what happened. And a neat feature that we have is the activity stream, which allows you to see exactly. What was done with that job? what date, what time, and by whom. So you’ll always have a complete status of that job record that you can look at and maintain in the system so that you never have to guess again, who did it, or, or where are the actual records themselves?

So let’s jump into, you know, how you actually capture a request from a customer, as they mentioned earlier. The system is sort of built on a request proposal, job creation, job execution, job review, and completion, and then billing. so, to start with a request, you would actually just go into the request and simply do a new request and you can title this whatever you want.

This is simply a text area where you can record, you know, what you’re being asked to do. And we give you the ability to add multiple sections to this request. So this one, in particular, is the project description. you can also select the source, whether it came in via a telephone call, an email, maybe a text message and you can select the contact that was previously set up at your companies, as to who sent the request.

If you want to add more sections, this one is terms and conditions, that’s the section that’s being added there now. So you can continuously add as many sections as you wish to define and describe the actual requests that came in as to what you want to do. Once you have the request, you’re going to take that and turn that into a proposal very easily.

You can convert it to a proposal at a click of a button, and now it gives you all of the information, all the fields to fill out, the actual proposal that year, create, you’ll see it carried over the request information that was put in previously. And now you can start in essence building the proposal and setting the dates of the job needs to be started setting the duration of the job.

And if you look up top, you always see where you are in the system. Right now, we’re in a draft of a proposal. And what we’re doing here is we’re adding the different job types that we created to the job and then when you add them, bring all of the equipment and consumables that should be used on that yeah.

Into the actual, proposal or record itself. And then you can make any of the online items, billable or not billable, override the costs and set a new cost or rates for each item that’s in the system. Right. If you’re building the proposal, And then you see, we put a cost summary together and we even allow you to create a simple quote out of this, to be able to send to your customer.

You can either email it directly from the system or download it and send it a different way, either your own email or, or even, not to print it and give it to them. So, very simple and creating a proposal with all of the elements already in the system. It happens very quickly and you can kind of do this on the fly.

So once you have this proposal, how do you actually convert this to a job you’ve won the business, you’ve been awarded the opportunity. And so in order to do that, you simply go into the system. Find the proposal that we just worked on. and now you want to approve that proposal so that it can become a job and you see all of the information is still here.

So we got a PO number. We approve the proposal and you’ll see that the status changes on this to approved. And at that point, we can convert it to a job. Once we convert it to a job, it now changes the prefix on the, on the numeric to the job. And now you can start building out the job that you want to send to your technicians.

You can add other instructions to the technicians. You can attach documents to them. if they need the other specific instructions to execute the job. And once you’re happy with it, you can schedule it right here from the job menu and a simple job scheduler or, but this matching panel that you can see the job exists there on the left-hand side, and we can select the resources in this case, we’re going to take team one and we’re going to look at their calendars to see exactly if they’re available at the time we need to schedule this.

We have the ability to look at the allocation of them over the month. and, ultimately just drag and drop the job on to those, those particular technicians finalize the time and it is safe. And now the job has actually been scheduled and each of the technicians associated with that job. We’ll receive an email, a notification that they have a new job.

It has a link in that email. That’ll take them directly to the job and they’ll be able to execute. If they’re already in the tool, they’ll get a notification, at the notification bar in the tool that they have a new, new job.

So once the technician gets that email and, and clicks the link to take them into, the actual work itself, we have a specific view for technicians. So this goes back to the roles that we showed in the setup. You have the administrator, the dispatcher, the field technician in the field crew roles.

Field technicians and field crew see a slightly different view than everybody else because they’re not allowed to see all of the setup information for the work. They just get dispatched to jobs. So their view looks similar to this and they have the ability to sort on the status of the job.

And then they simply click a job, and it takes them right into the details that, were set up by the dispatcher or by, the administrator who was sending the job and they can see all the details and the documents and anything else you attached to that record once they get ready to execute the job, they hit start job, and then they go into the individual job inputs.

And here’s all those fields that we set up as part of the job type for them to complete and fill out. You’ll see here, this is a text field, and as you scroll down and find different fields, you’re going to find, pull down where you will find date fields. and you’ll even see a signature field here, in a second where the technician can sign up for the work.

And so all of this gets captured and added into the system, and this is how we execute the separation of data and, and form. And so the technician just simply goes through the process in a linear fashion, collecting all of the information that they need to collect as they do the job, they hit save on the common inputs and now they can actually start the inspection process.

And so they add inspections to the job. And this is all of the individual points that they’re going to be inspecting and the data that they’re going to collect from it. And so you could see the technician just, scoots through here and collects the information. We have a meet function called save and preserve.

And that allows you to keep the information that they just entered. If they’re only changing one or two fields, they can keep that information and go on to the next inspection point and simply, save it. and you’ll see, you have a record of every individual inspection point that they did. Now, if you want to see what it looks like and what we share with the customer and what the final record looks like.

You go to job report inputs, where we actually take that output form and put all of the data back into what you want it to look like. And job report inputs give you also the ability to add customer signatures. So you can show this onsite to a customer, have them sign it dated, accepted. And when they do that, it fills the form in, and you’ll see the customer’s signature and the technician signature in the final document.

If you want to see what it looks like as a completed item, you hit preview and you see all the fields completed, including the signatures on the final document. And that’s actually the completed inspection report. The last thing a technician will do is. Record their time and, and potentially mileage.

What we’ve done with the system is allow you to record time against a specific, inspection type. So as your technicians are working towards higher skills, you will always have a record of how many hours they worked per inspection type. And that is just captured, simply at the end, when they complete the job.

When you hit complete job, we all also give you the ability to record an overall time for that job not specific to an inspection type. And so you can record the day’s work as the technician, you know, finishes up and once they’re done, they hit save and it actually pushes all the information back to the system in real time.

And you can see the inspection is no longer on their menu, because they’ve actually finished that work.

So, what happens to it when they’re done?

So back down to the dispatch side of things, you come in to complete a job and you actually can see all of the detail of the work that they did when they finished it, the job types that went with it, and then all of the individual job reports that they completed while on site. This is where you can do a final review of the work.

And you can even open this, up by reopening the job and editing the data. If you have to, make adjustments to it. And so you can see all of the information here. and at this point, you know, you can come complete the job and even send an invoice to the customer. And you’ll see, we only did one job out of the two.

So you saw only the stuff that was completed when that’s all said and done, we have this, really cool billing, analysis, the section that allows you to go in and. select things like equipment or labor or parts, and look at your costs associated with them. and what you build. You can look at profitability based on a customer level if you want.

And all of that data stays in the system and you can look at it over periods of time and, keep it all, nice and neat in the system. If you’re using an external tool to do all your finance and billing, then, at this point, this is where you would either extract it, from, from the system into Excel, or leverage our API to push it into another tool.

So that’s kind of a fast walkthrough, of the system. when something really key features, and how easy it is to actually use and apply to, your business. So what I want you to take away from today’s call is really that the system was designed, specifically for inspection businesses. We tried to look at the challenges and the problems that you’re all facing these days and make a simple, easy to use tool to address those, those needs, setup, and deployment is very easy. getting those forms in there, we actually will help you with the first a bunch of forms and also train you on how to do it should you want to make those inputs and changes yourself. We are a SaaS solution so we are going to continuously innovate on this platform.

And bring new features to the customers, always looking for feedback and information from customers as to what we should be adding to the tool. And we’re very proud of that integrated, forms engine that we have. We think it’s extremely flexible and a significant value proposition for customers that are dealing with many different types of paper forms and or Excel forms forcing technicians either fill it out in paper and then transfer it to Excel and then email it. You don’t have to do that with the system any longer. We do have flexible licensing. We can scale and contract with your business needs so you can add and take away technicians as needed. And at the end of the day, it’s really a complete operations management system.

We have an API that allows us to integrate with other systems. So if you’re not using our mini CRM for the proposal or the quote on the front end, you can actually pull that data from someplace else, put it into the system and then, build and schedule the jobs. Thereafter, the same thing is true for the invoicing and billing stuff.

If you want to just take the result numbers out of our system, and you can do that as well. That’s the quick run-through of our system today. Brett, I’ll turn it back over to you.

Floodlight Software: Okay. Well, thank you, Mike. That’s a great insight into the software and the benefits that can bring to an inspection business.

We appreciate it. We do have some questions, so let’s get to some of these now. So, Mike here’s the first question. We have both direct employees and many contract workers. How would your system be used to support both? 

Mike: Yeah. So great question. It’s very simple. You have total control over the users of your system. And so, with our flexible licensing, you can do month to month licensing. You can add third party people and add your own direct people, which will give them access to your system. They’ll have to work in your system the way you want them to work. So you can just simply add contractors as a user, then when their contract is up, you turn them off. They no longer have access. So, we think that’s a really neat feature. We don’t try to charge you for a one-year subscription for somebody that you’re only going to have onboard for two or three months.

Floodlight Software: Okay. next question. Well, this one’s a bit of comment along with the question. The system looks really relevant to our business. Who do I contact and how quickly can I get a demo? 

Mike: Oh, sorry. I meant to go to this last slide. So, we can do that very quickly and so here’s my contact information. You can reach out to me directly and we can set up a demo as soon as you’re available. We can dig deeper into the system and show you specifically how it would work for your business.

One of the things that we encourage potential customers to do is to send us some of their forms. We’ll actually build those into the tool because it’s so quick for us to do that. And then we’ll do the demo with your form so that it becomes more relevant for your business. So you’ll see exactly how it would work and operate for your business.

So I encourage you to reach out and, and, give us a call and we’re happy to set that demo up. 

Floodlight Software: Okay. next question. Can the system handle automated UT inspections and x-ray images? 

Mike: So another good question. and I think the answer is, it depends. How do you want to, how do you want to do that? So we have the ability to give the technicians, one of the fields they can have in their work form is an attached field.

And so you can add a file, into the, into the actual work form and it will always stay with that particular work. So if it’s an image, we can, we can pull that image, and then we can even display that image as part of the final report, for larger, say, UT files. you may want to, you know, look hard as to how you want to, actually store and hold that information right now.

We’re not doing analysis on UT files, but we can actually store the files in the system. it just depends on, on the structure of what you want to do with them and how you want to, share those later on if you’re doing analysis on those and whatnot, but we do have the ability to, to basically add an attached file field for the technicians to, attach virtually any, any type of, element, to the actual work order.

Floodlight Software: Okay. let’s make this, this, let’s let this question be. The last one is as we’re kind of running out of time here, but, can you explain how the product is priced, slash licensed? 

Mike: Sure. so, the first thing I’ll say is, we don’t charge, necessarily for any upfront costs for setup. We think that getting the tool in people’s hands and eliminating barriers to entry is extremely valuable for the business.

So we don’t charge any upfront costs. As I said, you know, we will help you do the first bunch of forms. As part of our onboarding, we’ll teach you how to do that as well. And then what we do is we price by the number of users and the different types of users. So, based on, admin or dispatcher or field tech user, they’re all, they’re all priced differently.

It’s honestly licensed because you can sign up at a discount for, around the term. but it’s pretty simple and pretty straightforward. We tried to match our licensing to how you run the business and can provide flexibility. To use the tools and, scale and contract if you need it. 

Floodlight Software: Okay, that’s all the questions we can get to. If your question wasn’t answered, we’ll follow up with you directly. We really appreciate all of you being here and taking the time out to join us. Please contact Floodlight Software for more information or if you’d like to set up a custom demo for your team.

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