Case study: ServiceMaster Clean

ServiceMaster Clean Newbury, owned and operated by Deeland Limited, is one of the largest and most successful ServiceMaster franchise businesses in the UK, offering  a wide range of specialist cleaning services designed to meet and exceed their clients’ expectations.  Their business retention rate is one of the highest in the cleaning industry.

Deeland Limited needed a customer service web application that would enable the business to schedule the wide and varying range of cleaning services whilst also allowing the customers to login to a portal to view online the service programmes contracted to them and an up-to-date position regarding service visits made.

The database required was to support a wide range of applications from defining initial unit costs for various tasks and producing quotes, through to creating weekly work sheets and planning work schedules, and finally financial tools allowing invoices to be created.

In addition to the web application, a mobile app was required to replace paperwork such as job sheets and simplify Health & Safety Risk Assessments and other tasks.

After an introduction from KLOC’s MSP partner ASAP Computer Services, Nick Dee Shapland, Managing Director of Deeland  Limited chose, KLOC as their development partner to build a web application and mobile app.

KLOC met with Nick and carried out a thorough discovery exercise in order to fully understand the complex needs of the business. Due to the bespoke nature of Deeland’s requirements, KLOC proposed PHP Laravel as the platform to build the application.

KLOC built a bespoke web application to include all the complex features initially identified. Due to the flexibility of Laravel, KLOC were also able to add a significant number of additional features as the project progressed to not only meet Deeland Limited’s business requirements but surpass their expectations.

The custom mobile app fully integrates with the web application, allowing cleaning staff to login and see their task list, confirm the status of tasks, show addresses of sites and add photos on Health & Safety and task checklists. Operatives can only see their tasks, once they have completed a risk assessment of the site in question, they  can  take pictures of the site they are working on, record those pictures against the site address, and check off tasks as they are completed – all in real time. This significantly simplified the process for staff leading to saving in both time and the amount of paperwork created.

On the 27^th June 2018, Nick Dee Shapland, Managing Director of Deeland Limited decided that the database with its web application and mobile app development had opened up new business opportunities.  So Nick decided to demerge the ownership of the software from Deeland Limited and set up a new company Taskport Limited, which would give him the opportunity to carry on working closely with KLOC in the future development of the Web Application.