Background
The Gardener is a successful Canadian-owned and operated Landscape maintenance franchise, and has been serving families and commercial properties across Canada for more than 30 years.
The Challenge
With thousands of customers and dozens of franchise owners, The Gardener eventually outgrew its business systems and was searching for a solution. After several failed attempts at using off the shelf industry solutions, The Gardener contacted RadEffect.
The Solution
Through a process of business analysis, it became clear that we had to start from the ground up. Just like a car runs not only on fuel, but on oil and water as well, many businesses run their daily operations through the lens of service flow and cash flow, and fail to understand the importance of data flow. Quality data is the life blood of modern businesses, and by leveraging it, businesses can better serve their customers, increase revenue, and control costs.
With projects of this magnitude, the key to success is to think big and start small. Not everything has to be in place on day one, but the vision needs to be in place to allow for additional capabilities to be added over time.
With that in mind, we started with defining the major data masters for The Gardener. We had to answer questions such as what is a customer, what is a service, how to track seasonally adjusted pricing, and how to govern the different franchise territories. We also had to analyze the vast set of services The Gardener was providing during spring, summer, fall and winter, and how these services were being offered by the different franchise territories.
We then turned our focus to business flows. These span the entire life cycle of doing business with a customer, starting with lead processing, confirmation, billing, servicing and renewing service at the beginning of each season.
The next step was to take the data from the old system, which held years of customer, service, and invoicing data, clean it up and load it into the new system. This is a painstaking process of mapping data attributes, adding missing information, changing data structures and having multiple iterations of load-test-fix-repeat. The benefits of this process are in retaining legacy data in the new system together with future data, which is very useful for various business analytics.
Claris FileMaker is an awesome Low Code Rapid Application Design environment, and we used its full set of capabilities to implement The Gardener’s Backoffice business flows to allow the central office to service all franchise owners.
Claris FileMaker’s powerful WebDirect technology allows people in the field to access relevant data using browsers, and we’ve taken full advantage of that capability to empower franchise owners to run their own business. Imagine an owner sitting in his truck at 2am during a snow storm and having full access to the list of customers to be plowed and shovelled, where to go next, how to get there (using Google Maps navigation), record when service has started and when finished, add any special service comments, then have the system email or text the customer at service completion.
We specialize in system-to-system integrations and have integrated FileMaker with Moneris for credit card processing, with Amazon for customer document retention and targeted mass emailing, with BetterForms for the customer’s sales portal and the field crew service portal, and with other 3rd party service providers such as DocuSign.
The Gardener had the foresight to recognize that it needed not a quick patching of the current way of running its business, but an in-depth overhaul, and so we set on that journey which was to bring The Gardener to its leading position today. No other company of similar size in the landscaping industry can claim to be doing a better job of servicing its customers, and a lot of that claim to fame rests with The Gardener’s flexible and powerful business system.
