Oil pipelines, railways, and renewable energy are just some of the big industries taking over as Kenya continues to develop and transform its infrastructure. Takamoto Biogas is one such sustainable and renewable energy company, providing reliable energy in rural areas for Kenyan farmers. Takamoto Biogas mission is to help the people of Africa with their daily lifestyles. This renewable energy company is partnered with local companies and organizations throughout Kenya and they have already served hundreds of customers who are mainly low-income farmers. Takamoto Biogas requires only the waste produced on farms, which then transforms biodegradable wastes into clean, unlimited supply of cooking fuel, heat, or green energy. The digester is installed in one day and pre-filled with cow dung, water, or other waste products resulting in biogas produced within a few days. Takamoto Biogas delivers results to both the people of Africa and effective, long-term sustainability to the environment.

"MobiWork allows our business to literally reach customers in difficult locations in an extremely efficient way by giving our leadership full visibility of our field operations, which made us go entirely paperless."
- Laura Schutter, Director of Communications at Takamoto Biogas

Key Challenges: Rural Location Tracking & Visibility

In remote parts of Kenya, there are many farmers without necessary resources, such as electricity and clean water. The poor infrastructure and remote areas make it difficult to access remote farms as much of rural Kenya has no roads or street names. When Takamoto Biogas began installing biogas systems they were having a hard time tracking customer homes, as well as keeping track of customer locations. Due to the nature of rural environments, the management team wanted a solution that could manage and capture customer data in areas with no network connectivity.

Takamoto Biogas installs hundreds of biogas systems per year. The installation process takes one day but involves many key steps for correct installation. Often, their field technicians were struggling with keeping track of installations steps, as well as managing multiple checklists for multiple locations. Prior to finding a solution, technicians were managing the checklists on paper, which made it hard to maintain their records, the number of installations, and their sales funnels. The management team wanted to find an easy to use solution so that their team could be accountable for following the installation procedures and capture and track data in offline mode for all customer visits, including notes, pictures, and locations.

Results: Paperless, Visibility Gains & Installations Streamlined

As a renewable and clean energy company, Takamoto Biogas searched for a mobile workforce solution that matched their vision to help them go paperless and found MobiWork. After implementing MobiWork, Takamoto Biogas found great results and a large increase of visibility in the field of business and customer tracking. Perhaps one of the largest benefits in implementing MobiWork was that in rural areas, they could find exact customer locations properly, which is helpful for installations, maintenance, and repair services.

Thanks to MobiWork, Takamoto Biogas sales funnel was streamlined, as they could visualize the data captured was managed, tracked, and stored in one central place. The MobiWork sales funnel dashboard allows the management team to make executive and insightful decisions on areas for improvement. Takamoto Biogas management was relieved that MobiWork gave them a bulletproof process to manage their installation process, which indirectly led to higher employee accountability. Takamoto Biogas management looks forward to implementing more of MobiWork's rich features set, such as integration for invoicing.