Introduction

With more than 20 employees working offshore, Lisa Phillips, Group General Manager at Aizer Group, understood the pitfalls of not having standard operating procedures to guide operations. Despite their zeal, there was only so much the employees could do without documents to reference. Without having Lisa around when they needed to ask questions, they risked making grievous mistakes or spending too much time on tasks at the company’s expense. Leveraging technology, Lisa sought out a system that would enable her to guide her employees without necessarily being physically present with them. She explains how SweetProcess was the game-changer and more in this case study. First, let us learn a little bit about Aizer Group to give you an idea of how a similarly sized company can use SweetProcess to improve their remote work and processes.

About Aizer Group

Aizer Group is the product of a merger involving different businesses in the construction and building industry in Australia. Consisting of top players, it is a leading name in recurring and one-off services in the areas of commercial property and facility management.

The company operates in several independent trades including electrical, plumbing, carpentry, air conditioning, painting, plastering, roofing, and cabinetmaking. Each trade boasts of individual sector divisions spearheaded by a manager working closely with a dedicated team. These divisions include insurance rectification, general building, preventive and reactive maintenance, and facility services. It currently has about 110 employees, with more than 20 of them working remotely.

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The Breaking Point

Like many modern businesses, Aizer Group understood the importance of documenting their processes. However, the company used a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach by creating documents with tons of pages to assist their employees in being efficient. Recounting the documentation process, Lisa says:

“It’s just pretty much relying on us mapping out general procedures and policies in black and white writing…20-page documents that really don’t get the behavioral effects that you need for people to do their jobs.”

It was not until they wanted to expand their offshoring staff that they discovered a large hole existed in their business processes all these years. Faced with the challenge of building an effective offshore team for its backend administration, the multiple pages of documents they created over the years did not help. They needed something more.

“We were looking at, what is the best way to actually get all the processes mapped out and used as a training tool as well? That was the driver for us to look at: okay, how are we going to do this so the guys know what they need to do and do it right?”

The fact that a problem is not glaring does not mean that it does not exist – and that it’s not important enough to deal with.