Overview
Brewers is the largest independent decorator merchant in the UK. Starting out as a small family business over 100 years ago, Brewers has grown over the past century to become a multi-faceted enterprise with 170 locations across England.
Having decided that a digital transformation was necessary, Brewers first approached FORM with a health and safety survey project. They soon discovered the true power of the platform, and the project quickly turned into a mobile Quality Management application designed to drive operational excellence across all stores.
While looking for software for all our other processes, we came across FORM and realized that it has everything we need.
— Paul Sandison, Digital Development Manager
Problem
Before engaging with FORM, Brewers was acompany that ran on paper forms. They had paperforms for audits of daily practices, health and safety,and fleet management. They had human resourcesforms, forklift training forms, and monthly fuel return forms. All of these forms were on paper, with multiple layers and colors to ensure all appropriate departments received their copy.
Solution
FORM developed a custom version of their mobile data collection platform that lets Brewers’ inspectors perform daily operational audits on a mobile device. Brewers also uses FORM for brand, health, safety, and compliance evaluations across all branches.
“When we first saw FORM, we were blown away by how powerful it was. It does everything.
It’s managed to fulfill all our needs in one. It’s flex ible enough to do that. We can literally collect any information we like and then pump it directly into our systems.”
Complete with automated workflows and Corrective and Preventative Actions (CAPA), the solution re places the unwieldy stacks of rainbow-colored paper that take months to process and analyze.
Today, FORM automatically delivers data from branch inspections and audits directly into Brewers’ newly developed intranet system. From there, the information is shared and analyzed by senior leader ship, who make real-time strategic decisions to drive continuous improvement and operational excellence.
Brewers decided that it was “time to enter the 21stcentury” when they realized that they were missing out on the ability to gain insight and oversight into their distributed store-based operations. With an internal intranet project in the works, they knew that their paper-based data collection methods needed to be updated into
something that allowed them to make data-driven decisions. But withpaper, it was nearly impossible to aggregate all theinformation they gathered into a format that could be analyzed and acted on in a timely matter. That’swhen they decided, “We need to go digital for this.”
Results
Free from the constraints of old-fashioned paper, Brewers is now using mobile devices to capture data points from their audits of daily practices, health and safety inspections, and the effectiveness of fleet management across all 170 branches. They build their own forms on the platform but have no trouble contacting FORM’s support team if they get stuck.
The FORM help desk functionality is one of the best we have ever used. They are always on the ball. FORM has a very, very good help desk.
— Paul Sandison, Digital Development Manager
As an early user of FORM’s new reporting functionality, Brewers can now visualize their data on a dashboard that helps them measure the health of each location and monitor KPIs for everyone from the branch or regional manager down to individual employees. Regional managers can now see a cluster of his or her branches and get a high-level operational view of performance before filtering down to individual KPIs. Best of all, senior leadership can now make strategic decisions based on the data they receive. For example, Brewers transport managers now have a snapshot view of all the fuel that is being used across the business, and can drill down to measure efficiency by region, driver, and vehicle type.
Today, paper is a thing of the past at Brewers. They’re thrilled with their FORM implementation and look forward to driving continuous improvement and operational excellence across all 170 branches.
