Dyno-Rod reduces friction in the field and improves outcomes with Dynamics 365

Aging infrastructure impedes progress

The company was expanding its franchise business and product offerings. The expansion to more than 50 franchises across the UK, coupled with a growing portfolio of commercial accounts, meant a significant increase in drainage and plumbing work, with engineers visiting 700K British Gas customers per year. The aging software and hardware systems slowed work order entry, plus dispatching and managing field technicians was increasingly difficult to manage.

Recognizing the need for a comprehensive update, Centrica, the parent company of Dyno-Rod and British Gas, embarked on a mission not only to update but to completely revitalize the technological infrastructure of these field service-focused entities. This ambitious undertaking would involve crafting new strategies and processes to enhance service delivery, ensure compliance, and facilitate the integration of shared resources. Because Dyno-Rod was the smaller company, digital transformation would start there, with success and lessons learned applied to British Gas.

Dyno-Rod was eager to get started. It planned to take an agile approach with simplified, out-of-the-box features and integrations. The Dyno-Rod team identified the key challenges and weaknesses of its legacy systems:

1. Siloed information and processes causing inconsistent process application and laborious reporting with limited analytics.
2. An outdated, poorly performing field app hampered engineers’ day-to-day operations and made delivering timely, efficient service more difficult.
3. Cumbersome data management limited personalized service and customer engagement tracking.
4. Inefficient job scheduling and routing capabilities increased manual effort and operational costs.
5. Lack of control and visibility of resource allocation hindered the company's ability to quickly adapt to fluctuating demands.

Fitting the right pipe

Dyno-Rod hadn’t upgraded its on-premises Microsoft Dynamics 365 system in years. It was no longer being supported and had been heavily customized to make various integrations, functionalities, and APIs work correctly. But employees liked and were accustomed to the product, making the prospect of a switch to a new platform initially daunting.

It decided instead to move field operations to the cloud with Dynamics 365 Field Service. In addition to offering more features and capabilities than the legacy on-premises version, the new product easily integrated with other Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 productivity, and Azure data management products the company used.

The IT team began architecting the migration and user flows while the change management team set up multiple training and feedback sessions to help employees make the shift. Understandably, employees initially resisted learning a new tool and changing familiar processes. Over time, however, they could see how Dynamics 365 Field Service would simplify their workflows, improve business outcomes, and lay the groundwork for more agile and responsive service delivery models in the future.

On the job

For the most part, the IT team used standard migration, integration, and out-of-the-box features of Field Service to support business operations and workflows like phone bookings, assignment of engineers to work orders, mobile app notifications, refined work order management, and reporting.

However, some customization would be needed, and Dyno-Rod turned to Microsoft FastTrack for guidance on functionality. This included a new capacity management solution and adoption of the mobile app. A crucial part of the process involved integrations with multiple booking source APIs, such as Centrica legacy software, the British Gas website, the mobile app used by home care policyholders, Dyno.com for Dyno-Rod Direct On Demand work order requests, and the new B2B customer portal being piloted with key accounts which allows them to request service and receive updates.

The project went live at the end of 2020 with 40 users to work out any bugs that hadn’t surfaced during testing. It culminated with a big bang rollout to 2,000 users a few days later. A flurry of feedback and requests was addressed in short order. Soon, everyone was experiencing the efficiencies and benefits that leadership had envisioned from the start.

Eye-opening results and undeniable improvements

Benefits were quickly evident as employees finally had access to data in a centralized location, simplified processes, and much improved in-app experiences, such as:

Engineers make a dramatic increase in mobile app usage.

With the Field Service mobile app's intuitive user interface, streamlined processes, and faster performance—adoption skyrockets from 37% to 93%.

Call center agents get their work done in one-third the time.

Work order creation takes an average of 2 to 2.5 minutes, dropping from 8 minutes. This efficiency gain is a testament to the system's improved functionality.

Most new work requests are received electronically.

With 70% of work orders coming through APIs, fewer requests are made by phone or email, reducing the need for manual order entry and supporting the company’s goal of increasing B2B customer engagement.

Enhanced tracking of service level agreements increases customer satisfaction.

Dynamics 365 provides vital statistics, offering clear visibility into how well engineers and franchises are adhering to Dyno-Rod’s customer service commitments, ensuring they meet or exceed expectations.

Automated SMS updates improve customer communication.

Fifteen automated message options streamline customer updates about appointment details, status, and billing—leading to a reduction in phone call inquiries.

Standard quoting and invoicing across franchises.

Standardizing invoice formats and processing steps improves financial operations and provides a consistent brand experience for all customers.

New processes support Dyno-Rod's environmental goals.

Replacing paper checklists and other documentation with digital delivery reduces paper waste, and optimizing engineers' driving routes reduces time and fuel consumption—contributing to Dyno-Rod’s environmental initiatives.

Advanced data-driven reporting is available out of the box.

The integration of standard reporting with easy export of data to Power BI for deeper insights and visualization is revolutionizing data accessibility and enhancing decision-making processes for Dyno-Rod’s leadership.

Real-time capacity management provides visibility.

Comprehensive visibility of resource allocation enables real-time adjustments and eases workload management to quickly adapt to changing customer needs and service demands.

Empowering users through low-code/no-code customization.

Enabling technology users to create and modify workflows without extensive programming increases the pace of delivery for operational improvements and solutions fivefold.

Taking the plunge for more innovation

In October 2023, the company rolled out a new parts tracking system to all locations, replacing the franchise-specific processes that offered no visibility to customers, engineers, or headquarters. The new system will cut down on phone calls and complaints by providing information for both customers and Dyno-Rod employees about which jobs require replacement parts, when the parts will arrive, and the optimal time to schedule an engineer.

Dyno-Rod isn’t stopping there. The company has more Dynamics 365-related projects in the works, including a Resource Scheduling Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Field Service to optimize dispatching and remove manual steps from both scheduling and rescheduling. And deployment of a “find my engineer” service, which will send SMS messages to customers with a link they can tap to view where the orange Dyno-Rod van is and when it will arrive for their service appointment.

Plans further downstream include rolling out a B2B portal offering customers real-time updates and booking options, adding communication channels to enable real-time updates across franchises to ensure timeliness of important updates, and integrating Microsoft Fabric to further streamline operations and enhance data-driven decision-making.

Claire Shenton, Business Systems Manager, sums up the company’s experience this way: “Dynamics 365 enables us to continually look for and identify friction points and set about removing them for both our customers and employees. We also have a good dialogue with Microsoft and can let them know we need a specific feature and trust they will try to work it into a future release. Dynamics 365 has allowed us to think of what we want to do as an organization rather than how we just need to keep the lights on. We were very much in survival mode before from a systems perspective and now we’re in future mode.”