Yale Lifting Solutions, headquartered in Gauteng, South Africa, is part of the worldwide Columbus McKinnon consortium. Columbus Mckinnon has a 141-year history in designing, manufacturing and supplying reliable and safe lifting products around the world. Yale Lifting Solutions supplies a range of heavy duty lifting equipment, including hoists, winches, jacks, slings, pallet trucks, and rigging equipment throughout South Africa. In addition to the equipment they offer, they manufacture special equipment such as tailor-made jib cranes, lifting beams, suspended working platforms and cradles. Their clients include major mining industries, scattered throughout South Africa. Yale Lifting Solutions offers unique on-site inspections and load testing services for all the equipment used. Yale Lifting Solutions stands out amongst competitors due to the thorough inspections and documented forms they provide to customers.

"We have demanding requirements and need the highest performing software for our large-scale field service operations in remote areas with limited connectivity. MobiWork performs flawlessly, we are continuously impressed with the functionality, support, and performance."
- Ashley Davis, Sales & Marketing Manager of Yale Lifting Solutions

Key Challenges: High-Volume Electronic Forms, Limited Connectivity, Employee Visibility & Customer Satisfaction

Yale Lifting Solutions is mostly contract based, with an 87% work rate, and they provide services onsite for over 360 days a year. They service over 210 sites, and some of these project sites can take up to 17 days to complete. Many of their service locations are in rural and remote areas where there is limited or no network connectivity. Because their work locations have sporadic or non-existent network connectivity, they needed an optimized system that would perform well under those difficult conditions and that would reliably capture information in their electronic forms in offline mode.

Their team fills out a thousand inspection, proof load testing and compliance forms every day for legal and safety purposes. Yale Lifting Solutions was running high volume operations, and managing thousands of forms, with an outdated system that was not user-friendly. In addition to the difficult system in place, there was a lack of support from their software company, and they were inflexible in creating custom fields for capturing information, such as calculated calibrations. Often times, the system had difficulties with storage and processing of large amounts of data, and they had to record data by hand. The management team really wanted a system that was user-friendly, and capable of managing high volumes of confidential forms and documents.

The employees at Yale Lifting can be at one of two hundred work sites at any given time, and so there was a major lack of employee and customer visibility, as it was near impossible to track down multiple employees in the field and give customers an accurate time of when to expect the service technician. Yale Lifting Solutions management wanted a solution to provide technicians with the ability to check in on a mobile device, and translate real-time information back to the office.

Results: Major Transformation Overnight

The Yale Lifting team was so excited they were up and running and managing all of their operations and assets in less than a month. Ashley Davis, the Sales & Marketing Manager who has worked at Yale Lifting Solutions for 13 years said, "Switching to MobiWork was a quick process, we were easily able to import high volumes of data and transfer to them. MobiWork is more user-friendly, has functionality that we never had before, and has better support in place". MobiWork was able to help Yale Lifting Solutions save thousands in upfront custom building costs, and get up and running in a matter of days, not months. Ashley Davis says "The switchover was immediate, so easy to use with extra functionality, and MobiWork made it a less stressful transition for us."

MobiWork quickly generates reports and analysis from the custom data reports, providing the directors with actionable insight to employee and asset performance. Yale Lifting Solutions completes approximately 1,000 inspections a day for equipment installations, servicing, and repairs. Yale Lifting is thrilled their forms now include images captured from the field, geo-tags, signature, legal and compliance related fields, and the forms can be sent to customers. With employees in the field, it's important that routing and repair maintenance schedules are optimized, and that asset and employee compliance rules are regulated and properly conducted in the field. Ashley Davis says, "We have more than 50 unique, advanced, legal forms that capture images, location, and signatures in real-time, and are quickly sent out to customers. Our customers love the forms, and we've seen a 60% increase in automatic time and administration efficiency."

Ashley Davis said, "MobiWork is an industry grade, reliable, and truly advanced platform that has allowed us to create a configurable and scalable environment. We can process actionable data faster, isolate issues faster, and have better insight in the field". In addition, Yale Lifting Solutions is thrilled that training is simple and the technicians love that the app is fast, responsible, and reliable for capturing data, even in offline mode.

Yale Lifting also benefits from MobiWork as they've seen major gains of visibility in the field. Ashley Davis says, "We are a customer-centric company, the transformation for us is massive, because it's about empowering our employees and workers, and to do this you need a single platform that allows for scalability and real-time communication". MobiWork has helped Yale Lifting Solutions deliver asset compliance, visibility of day to day activities, and identify areas where they can streamline their business operations. Yale Lifting Solutions vision is to be the lead special equipment solution provider that is customer centric, as they expand their reach throughout Africa and other countries.