 Hello everyone and thank you to all who have tuned in today for this live webinar looking at how custom file maker apps can transform your service business. My name is David Borgness and I'm the FileMaker Business Development Manager for APAC. Joining me today is Craig Saunas, the founder and CEO of Digital Fusion, one of our FBA Platinum partners in the APAC region. It's also my pleasure to welcome Keith Kimmins. Keith is the owner and CEO of 2K Container Services and we will be talking about how a custom file maker app has transformed his service business. A brief piece of housekeeping as we get started, a broadband connection will deliver the best experience and you can listen to today's presentation through your computer speakers. If you are experiencing issues you can call one of the Citrix support numbers that I have on the screen and of course we will take questions at the end of today's presentation. During today's presentation you will have an opportunity to type in questions. If you think of a question during the webinar please go to the control panel, click on the questions section, enter the question and click send. We will cover as many questions as time allows at the end of today's presentation. To start I would like to talk a little bit about FileMaker Inc. as a company. FileMaker Inc. is an Apple subsidiary and our sole focus is enabling business teams to create their own custom business apps. We have a great deal of experience in this area, in fact over 31 years of experience. To date we have shipped over 24 million copies of our software to organizations all around the world. Custom apps built with FileMaker run cross platform on Windows, Mac and through the browser and we have seen a great deal of success on iOS with over 2 million downloads of FileMaker Go, our free app for iPhone and iPad. But to fully answer the question who is FileMaker, well I would say that we are a company that believes in the simple, not the complex. We empower people to create amazing apps to transform the way their business operates. Over the years we have spoken with our customers and we have found too often that their teams end up spending time and effort on unproductive, inefficient activities that make it more difficult to reach their goals. There are three common challenges that we constantly hear of from our customers. One challenge is inefficient processes. The workflow is error prone and time consuming, our team all approach a task in a different way and this means that it takes longer than it should to reach our goals. Another challenge we hear frequently is scattered information. In business today information is literally everywhere, in multiple applications, in notebooks, in spreadsheets, in someone's iPad, our team spends too much time and energy trying to find the information that they need. And finally people are still struggling with rigid technologies that aren't flexible enough to adapt to their specific business needs. Our customers know that technology can help overcome these problems but organisations often have a difficult time finding the technology that fits their exact needs. These challenges have a huge impact on business. It translates to inefficiency and lost productivity and this can cost your business money. You may be struggling with excessive emails, phone calls, texts to keep track of your team and their activities. You may be working with paper forms that you can't read, complex spreadsheets, image files, misplaced contracts. Your team's productivity may be challenged as people spend too much time to locate the information they need simply to action tasks. With the FileMaker platform you can develop a custom app that meets your exact business requirements and you can deploy the solution so that your entire team can participate, giving the team access via Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and the web. You can cost effectively bring together all the information that's needed. You can streamline business processes and track from start to finish. You can leverage rich content, send images and access data remotely. Giving everyone access will satisfy customer needs and deliver the efficiency and productivity that your business requires to meet your goals. So today's webinar is focusing on service businesses and what we mean by this is businesses that have staff or teams working on site or away from the office who need to perform tasks such as collecting data, creating quotes or documenting inspections and compliance. They may need to collect photos, signatures, provide clients with an invoice or a quote on the spot. There's lots of industries that you could consider as being service businesses. You might be out there installing or repairing. You might be managing a trade show or booths. You might be a landscaper, contractor, field beverage distribution. There's so many organizations that would fit within this category of business. So let's take a look at how a forward thinking business came up with a unique and creative way of getting themselves ahead with a custom file maker app. The business is 2K container services, a company that provides staff and expertise in unloading shipping containers and they work with Digital Fusion, a file maker business alliance member to design and build their custom file maker app. So let me start by introducing Craig Saunders, the founder and CEO of Digital Fusion. Craig is a certified developer himself with 20 years experience in file maker development. He's been a speaker at FileMaker DevCon and is globally recognized as a Platinum FileMaker Business Alliance member. Craig, welcome to today's webinar. Thanks David, it's a pleasure to be here. Craig, could you tell us about your company Digital Fusion and how you work with your customers? Sure thing. Digital Fusion is a company that I founded in 1996 to build custom business solutions and I pretty quickly settled on FileMaker as my platform of choice because there was nothing else that I could see that was this robust and this quick to develop with and truly cross-platform. In fact, to be honest we find FileMaker more consistent across-platform than even HTML and JavaScript today. So since then we've built up a team and there are now 11 of us which includes eight certified developers and that ranks as sixth in the world in terms of certified developers. We really believe in maintaining a high level of professionalism and that's why we require staff to get certified in each new version of FileMaker which is basically meant every year. We're also very proud to be part of the FBA Platinum community and that's a group that works very closely with FileMaker Inc, which is a little bit of the best outcomes for FileMaker users. Our offices are in Christchurch, New Zealand and then in Australia we've got an office in Sydney and an office in Brisbane up in Queensland. Actually, we've got clients all around the world including the USA, Spain and Russia. We build solutions for most industries but what we've really noticed is it doesn't matter what industry you're in and I'm including nonprofits, sporting organisations, the works. There's always ways to do things better, to streamline processes and to make the most out of the data and information that we all work with. And the other thing that we've really noticed is that this is not just a one off thing. It's always an ongoing journey of continuous improvement and that's where breaking away from those rigid technologies that you were talking about David really frees people up to evolve and grow and FileMaker is a perfect platform for doing that because it's referred to develop with a let you be agile and adaptive. So we specialise exclusively in FileMaker development but that takes different shapes for different clients. So for many like 2K containers we'll develop a system from the ground up. And then build and deploy it and then keep supporting and evolving it over many years. But there's also a lot of people out there who are building their own solutions and for those people sometimes they just want some help designing the solution or doing some integration with other systems or maybe sometimes they'll come to us and ask them to give us a makeover. So we offer those people support and assistance to suit and basically they're able to tap into our expertise. One thing about FileMaker apps is I said that they have a very long useful life. So it's not uncommon that we get called in to take over an existing system and help support and develop it further. You know maybe the in-house developer has moved on or whatever. On another front we're also helping people get FileMaker into the cloud now. So if you need help with that we've got a ton of expertise in configuring and managing cloud based FileMaker deployments. Craig before we look at how you helped Keith and 2K container services could you give us a quick background on what the typical process looks like when you work with a customer to build a new custom FileMaker app? Absolutely. We start by understanding the business and the processes that they want to automate. It's about getting on board with the client's vision and their goals and understanding things in a lot of detail. Then we'll set about producing a blueprint or a system design. Let me show you what I mean. So we start by working out the normalized data structure. You've got to have a sound data structure as the foundation or you're going to run into trouble down the track. So arguably this is the most important step in the entire process. It also acts as a model of the business in many ways. Then we'll look at what people are actually doing and write down their tasks and use cases so that we know how they go about their job, the steps they've got to go through. This is basically the work that we all do every day. We work out the processes to get the job done. But then quite often when you start to design a system and you're putting some automation in place, there's opportunity to streamline things and make those processes better. Once we've got the use cases down, we'll actually design the screens, just in a very rough form. So you can see on the screen there's a wireframe. But the more detail that we can get into that wireframe, the better, because it lets us see how it's all going to fit together. And you can step through the different screens to get a real sense of the actual workflow. Finally, we like to give each app a unique visual look and feel. So we'll take one or two of the mock-up screens and draw them up with the right colors and fonts so you can see how the finished app is really going to look. Craig, that's awesome. Really appreciate you giving us some detail on the process you take customers through. So what we'd like to do now is move over and take a look at your real world customer story with 2K container services. To do so, let's introduce Keith Kimmann. Keith is the founder and CEO of 2K Container Services, which he started in 2005. He set out with a vision to grow into a nationwide company here in Australia, while setting new standards for service, safety and professionalism in their industry. Welcome, Keith. Pleasure to be here. Keith, could you tell us a bit about your company and the challenges that your business faced prior to deploying your custom file maker app? Yeah, Dave. So back in 2005, we formed 2K Container Services. We specialized in packing and unpacking and shipping containers. My vision at the time was to create a service that was a benchmark in our industry in terms of safety and professionalism and to create a nationwide company on that basis. To a large degree, we have achieved that. And 10 years on, we've grown to over 100 team members or staff members servicing more than 20 major clients in Australia. So the core challenges that we're facing really came down to four major areas. They were safety, compliance, team marriage and invoicing. But safety is paramount to everything that we do with fairly high risk work and very monotonous, a lot of labor involved. And it was very important that when we were sending team members out on site, they would end up appropriately and they have the right documentation. Obviously, compliance is a big part of how we do business. Managing compliance can be very time consuming, keeping guys certificates and licenses on file. And if they didn't have it on them, they'd be costly penalties involved. Obviously, de marriage, de marriage is when a shipping container gets dropped off to a client's site, that we are required to unpack it in a certain timeframe. And if we don't do that, our clients incur a penalty or a cost. And obviously invoicing. So having to chase paper around and chasing teams around for the work that completed became very, very hard to do. And we needed something that was more centralised and easy for everyone to use. So what I wanted to do was find ways to capitalise on those challenges and to make sure we're more professional than the others and the head of the rest. I figured if we could capture incidents on the job site right when they happen, we'll be more efficient and more accurate in how we go about implementing steps of eliminating future incidents. Likewise, I thought if we could capture photographic details of how containers were being sent to us from overseas, we could then claim damages for our customers and they could push that back onto their suppliers. So anything that came in the container was documented. And another thing I thought was we needed to drive continuous improvement in our business to make sure there's profitability through innovation. Because our teams are mobile and at various sites around the country, we need to have everyone connected to a centralised database. So Keith, if you don't mind, could you let us know how you discovered FileMaker? Yeah, so funny story. I was actually in the Apple Store at Castle Hill buying some iPads and some desktop computers for our new office. And I just got talking to the business manager there for Apple and I told him of an idea I had. And it was quite a coincidence because that night they had a FileMaker presentation so he encouraged me to attend and I did listen to Craig and his team speak and after that the rest is history pretty much. Did you think about looking to see if there was a solution already in the industry that would work for your business or why did you look at a custom solution with FileMaker? I hadn't really looked in the industry. I just had an idea and neither because we're in such a niche market there'd be nothing out there. And there wasn't the only thing out there is the warehouse management system which there's a few around but it didn't really pertain to our area of the supply chain. So I needed to have something that was more custom built for 2K containers. Yeah, brilliant, it makes perfect sense. Keith, really appreciate that. Craig, would you walk us through where the development went to from here? Sure, we designed and built a very simple first version that allowed basically a manager to check off the staff who are on a site and then it would flag anyone who hadn't read and signed the documents. The app allows the staff member to read the PDF and sign on screen there and then if need be. Once that's done, we've got a permanent signed record that the employee is ready for the site and we can start to build up a record of who was where and when. Keith did some testing with that first version. We made a few refinements but we kept it very simple and focused just on that one problem. And then he was then able to roll that out and get some immediate benefit before we moved on and added pictures. That's awesome, Craig. Could you tell us a bit about how it works because if you're capturing information on an iPad, how does that data get stored and shared with other people in the business? Yeah, that's a good question, David. Obviously, iPads and the field of collecting data is all well and good but that data needs to be shared with other people in the company and the admin staff and head office and so on. So it needs to be centralized. There's two ways you can do that. You can do offline synchronization which involves collecting the data on the iPad and the field and then sending it back at a later time when you've got a good internet connection. We do that a lot because it means you're not relying on having that internet coverage everywhere you go. Plus it means that everything works really fast because you're just keeping on the device and not connecting to a remote data source. The other way you can do this is to have a connected solution and this requires a good internet connection at all times. However, the data is always up to the minute and live and this is the path we talk with 2K container services. So the 2K container services app is actually hosted by FireMaker Server in the cloud and the iPads connect to it over the cellular network. Going live, this proved to be very reliable and very fast so it was a very nice simple solution. And then we've got FireMaker Pro running on the desktops and office where the invoicing and reporting and so on is carried out. Essentially we built a different style of application for the office but it's hooked into the same backend database or running on that FireMaker server in the cloud. The whole setup means that everything is accessible from anywhere and there's no worries about data safety because it's not stored on premise or on those devices but it's safely in the cloud and it also means everyone is on the same page at all time. So we went on from there and we built some extra modules and extra features and capabilities for capturing health and safety incidents, capturing more job information and especially details of damage and badly packed containers and so on, as Keith was saying. Not only has the app had added features but we've also been working on keeping it up to date with a fresh new look as well. That's brilliant. So I guess Keith, how did you guys take to using the app and once you had them using it, what were the overall results? So thanks, good question Dave. As with all things with a bit of changes there's always pushback from the guys on the ground but once we sort of got our training up to date and started trained the right guys to use the application it became fairly easy and a lot of the guys realized the benefits and we weren't chasing the paperwork and all the other sort of licenses and all that sort of stuff it was all stored in the same place and it was a fairly similar process toward the end. So you saw some great results from what we're looking at across four fronts. Better safety, reduction in administration times, better customer relations and productivity. Can you explain exactly how the app has helped in these areas? Yeah, so in those different areas obviously safety was a big one. We've always had a very good safety record but we weren't very efficient in how we reported or how we stored all our documentation. Being a highly laborious job sometimes you get near misses and because we can now capture those near misses in real time we can put steps in place straight away to eliminate any incidents going forward so that's been a big win for us. When it comes to streamlined administration I mean could you give us a bit more detail on what that means to your business? So as I said before we use a lot of paper and obviously documenting our jobs and each team had to fill out paperwork as to what work was completed. After they'd fill out the work your admin coordinator would then have to go and chase all these bits of paper and supply it to the client as proof of the work completed. Now that we can just simply add all our work to the iPhone, into the app our admin costs have decreased by some 30% our admin coordinator now simply just logs onto a desktop finds all the relevant dates and groups everything together sends an invoice off and the clients have documentation as well. Fantastic, so from a customer relations perspective how do you think this has impact to your business and why? So it's had a massive impact simply because the container side of your supply chain is kind of missing links so whenever we used to push charges back under the customer there was never any real way to capture any proof so to speak but now with the simple iPad app with FileMaker everything's documented we're taking pictures any time we've got to change the charges the customer's got access to that in real time so there's no arguing over invoices and things like that, it's a seamless process. Now better productivity for any organization has to be the dream could you give us some understanding of what the FileMaker custom app has done for your business in the way of productivity? Yeah, so now because we've got that centralized system any one of their managers can jump online onto their laptop or on their desktop FileMaker app and track each team's performance so we can now schedule a lot better when we know what sort of containers we're receiving we can send the right guys to that job who've been inducted on site that's a massive one so we're not having any downtime having to induct guys constantly and we FileMaker's also the guys at Digital Fusion out of the feature where we can get historical data and print out reports of productivity on site so we know which teams are performing and which ones aren't and most of the time it just requires some retraining so it's made all that process visible to us. People are accountable, I get it and look Keith that's brilliant it's so good to see that a relatively simple app has really helped across a number of facets within your business so here's got to be the ultimate question what sort of overall return on investment do you think this has had and can you quantify that? Yeah so obviously it's a tough one to quantify a number but really there's a couple of key points that have saved us a lot of money and a big one is admin so we're saving about 15 grand a year on admin in time and in paper we'll be using we're probably spending about five to $7,000 a year just simply on paper we are now paperless so that's saved us money there obviously because invoicing is accurate as well we're getting paid properly for the work we're actually doing and there's no two-ing and prying between us and the customer which is obviously less time we're spending having to argue with them which is always a good thing it's good for our client relationship as well the OH&S part of the app has saved us considerably because we're not having to chase documentation anymore it's all stored in the one place any time a guy is on site we know if he was meant to be there if he hasn't been inducted we know before we send him out there he's got to get inducted so we can send our trainer and assessor out there to do that straight away a big thing is it's really set us apart because in our industry there's no one doing what we're doing in terms of visibility of our operation we're pretty open on us with our clients of what we do and I think that's kind of a big win for us because we were the missing link in the supply chain and now we are very visible with this app the app has also allowed us to gain new business so we've picked up a couple of very big key national clients in the time we've had this app you know we went from a million and a half dollar a year a million and a half dollars a year business to now we're trading in excess of seven to eight million a year so it's helped us grow massively and it's allowed us to grow comfortably because we know we've got the systems to back us up so everyone in the same page that's fantastic Keith I really have to thank you for your time today and for sharing your FileMaker custom app success story it's great to see how your FileMaker app has transformed the business it's no doubt it's become part of your competitive advantage Craig I'd also like to thank you for joining us today and for you know introducing your company digital fusion and sharing some information on the process that you take a business through when you transform their business through a custom FileMaker app so with that what are the next steps that you can take well if you're interested in transforming your service business the first thing I would recommend would to be to visit a resource page that we have created specific to service businesses so if you go to FileMaker.com and hover over the drop down for custom apps and select resources and of course the URL is on the screen well you'll land at what's called the service business toolkit now this toolkit you'll find has a number of very valuable reports some success guides some other webinar recordings and of course access to a free starter solution that might be the ticket to get you on your way at the same time if you do want some more assistance from FileMaker well the first thing I do if you haven't done so already is go and download a free 15 day trial of FileMaker Pro 15 and get started take a look at the FileMaker training resources there's a lot more webinars as I said that you can visit on different topics that will be of value and of course if you do need any further assistance with resources or licensing programs for FileMaker my email and contact details are on the screen feel free to drop me a call also with regards to Digital Fusion our Platinum FBA partner well take a look at their website you'll find there some fantastic stories and the great work that they've done for customers all around the country and around the world if you want to discuss things further with Digital Fusion there's a number on the screen there's an email address that you can send your inquiry to we will definitely be following up with some further information after today's webinar but let us know how we can be of assistance now with that I'm just going to take a moment now to open up for some questions we look forward to seeing if we can give you some further direction