Situation
Regardless of industry, revenue management is at the core of every business’ success. For a company with an operations team of over 100 professionals servicing 50 unique projects every day, Wagstaff Crane struggled with backlogged service tickets, duplicate work, and generally slow processes for their revenue management. Wagstaff was looking for a more streamlined solution to capture customer and team data–even in remote places where data coverage is sparse.
Extended Invoice Cycles and Lost Opportunity
Field employees rarely come into the office, which means they would accrue up to 9 business days worth of service tickets before turning them in. This slow, paper process led to approximately 2% of service tickets getting lost and controllers not noticing it was never invoiced until up to 3 months later–at which point customers didn’t want to pay and risked souring the relationship. By using Redlist’s app, the team at Wagstaff was able to completely eliminate the 9-day gap in service tickets and capture 99.9% of the invoice delivery.
Service Ticket Approval Delays
The tickets that did make it back to the office were hitting another speed bump. The approval process averaged 3 business days, which only extended the payment cycle.
By using the Redlist app, the approval can happen in real time with all of the information immediately accessible. Furthermore, service ticket approvers reviewing line items can easily gather missing or inaccurate information from field employees while it is still fresh in their minds.
Double Entry Waste
The final hurdle in Wagstaff’s revenue management process was a 6 business day backlog in the accounting department. Not only did this continue to delay the time from work completion to invoice and payment, but also converting service tickets to invoices was unnecessary double-entry costing about 11 minutes of labor per ticket. Redlist’s app continues to speed up the revenue management process by reducing the accounting backlog, as well as eliminating the need for double entry. The total savings from double-entry alone is 2,292 labor hours or $45,833 per year.
Missing Line Items Losses
In the worst cases, 4% of tickets took 22 days to go through this process and another 4% took over a month. When employees are working on 50 different projects every day and the approval and invoicing takes 18 days to over a month, missing billable line items are much harder to recall and correct. Wagstaff’s service ticket approvers found 1.5% of line items missed, half of which were disputed by customers and lost as revenue. Not every missing line item is caught, so an additional 1.5% is estimated to be missed and result in lost revenue as well. These may sound like small numbers, but it adds up. Wagstaff’s total lost revenue due just to missing and disputed information is equal to $675,000 per year.
By using the Redlist Operations app for processing service tickets, Wagstaff has increased their annual earnings by $1,097,833.
