Xylem Tree Experts (Xylem) is the largest tree care service company in the Southern United States. Xylem was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. Xylem provides tree care services for federal, state, and local government agencies, as well as the private sector, municipality, and utility companies throughout the Southern United States. In addition, they provide special services for residential and commercial properties, such as DOT right-of-way vegetation management, disaster recovery services, brush mowing services, and line clearance tree trimming. Xylem is a TCIA Accredited Company and has approximately 500 employees. As a leader in this industry, Xylem Tree Experts plans to accelerate their growth and expand their services throughout the nation.

"For the first time in 42 years, we have a system that works for our company. This highly mobile platform has been revolutionary and has allowed us to transform our business operations."
- Randolph Hoover, CEO of Xylem Tree Experts

Key Challenges: Asset Management, Traceability & Accountability

Xylem Tree Experts provides services to over 100 sites, and they must closely monitor both their assets and employees in order for operations to run smoothly. Due to Xylem's large-scale operations, the management team struggled with asset management, planning, servicing, repairs, and maintenance. Due to some of the remote service locations, Xylem had major difficulties with tracking paper records for both assets and employees, specifically in offline mode. Asset information was also near impossible to capture in the field, there was not an efficient way to capture photos, information, or enough time to manually record inspection data. In addition, information was not translated immediately, as many of the service locations are in remote areas where there is no network connectivity, and there were often duplicated and error-prone data entry before the information was processed.

In this industry, workplace safety and training is a significant priority, as it often involves large mechanical equipment, heights, very dangerous environmental conditions as well as important legal and safety rules. Many of Xylem's safety protocol involves specific operating procedures for working with live high voltage electrical lines and requires specific training and certifications. Xylem needed a secure solution to manage and monitor their technician's skills, licenses, training needs and compliance guidelines. In addition, they need to record all employee training and equipment history, proof of coverage, and technician licenses.

After trying to develop their own system from the ground up, they quickly found that it would be time extensive and cost prohibitive. It was CEO, Randolph Hoover's, main vision to find a customizable mobile platform that would manage assets, employees, and bring his team together, allowing for effective communication and scalability for his business.

Results: Optimized Asset Management, Visibility & Productivity Gains

Xylem Tree Experts have close to 15 million USD invested in valuable assets and any downtime has to be minimized. With MobiWork, each foreman performs inspections and can request at any time an intervention to repair or optimize an asset and the operations team can track the status of any asset or any project from anywhere. Randolph Hoover stated "MobiWork helped us increase productivity by 87% and gave us full visibility in our business. Asset management and tracking are crucial to properly monitor our complex and expensive equipment". MobiWork has also given Xylem a bullet-proof method for capturing data in offline mode, such as statuses of fleets, projects progress, time tracking as well as financial visualization for job costing.

Employee safety and legal electronic forms have been invaluable for Xylem. All employee's certifications and skillsets are automatically confirmed before they are assigned to a project. Xylem has secure electronic forms for all employees and equipment history, proof of coverage, accident documents, licenses... which ensures legal compliance.

MobiWork connects hundreds of employees, and thousands of assets across organizations, locations, and time zones. MobiWork developed custom project features for Xylem, allowing them to assign project leaders to specific crews, sites, and assets. Xylem loves that they can quickly generate and analyze custom data reports, providing the directors with actionable insight to the employee and asset performance. Randolph Hoover exclaimed, "Our business relies on MobiWork and we've seen a dramatic impact on all aspects of our operations, including a major increase in productivity, visibility, and employee accountability."