Under normal circumstances, Electricity North West Services schedules an appointment with the property owner, then visits the property and carries out the necessary work. But without any access to properties due to the impending lockdown, the routine work would inevitably grind to a halt.

As the COVID-19 situation developed,” says Wild, “it became apparent very quickly that we were going to be severely impacted. It was going to restrict our cashflow and the work coming in, and we identified that we needed to diversify quickly. To do that, we needed to keep a good record of how COVID-19 had impacted us. We’d need a record of any new workstreams that were coming online, and we needed to know how we were going to track that work and close it within our IT system. We knew our existing system wasn’t going to do what we needed it to do, so I made a phone call to triopsis to find out how they could help.”

“The way triopsis has always interfaced with us as a company is brilliant, and because they understand how we operate, they could identify some of the changes we needed. Thanks to their knowledge of us as a client, they could very easily put us a package together, making recommendations as to how we could change the existing IT solution and adapt it to suit what we needed to do. They also gave us ideas about additional benefits that we’d not even considered.”

Triopsis is a ‘no code’ platform that can be easily altered without going through an extended development process, and with a plan in place, the team was able to act at speed. It took just five days – from signing off the plan and budget to completing the roll-out – for the system to be adapted to the new COVID-19 reality.

“Some changes were done immediately, and the rest was done within days. It was faultless.”

Because we are paperless, we could transfer work in order to maximise the output of particular teams. Where we might previously have had 20 to 25 teams working on site, we could condense that down to around 15 teams, and reallocate work without moving any paperwork. That was a huge benefit. The other ten teams could then be quickly deployed onto other workstreams that were captured and recorded through triopsis thanks to the changes that were made. It’s been massively reassuring to know there’s a company that will work with us, that understands our needs, and that can be trusted to deliver a timely solution at the right cost. The situation could have had a very significant impact on our cashflow, turnover, and everything to do with running the business. But it was very quickly mitigated by the speed and adaptability that triopsis gave us.”

All the data about how COVID-19 has impacted us is there. What we did, how our decisions affected us financially – we can look back on it all through triopsis and know the data is accurate. We’re planning for the future but we need to understand what’s happened in the past, and triopsis lets us do that. At the moment, the system is robust and clever enough to do everything we need, but we also need to be looking two or three months in advance. So we’re working with triopsis on what the return to ‘business as usual’ might look like – whenever that might be.”