Case Study: Roto-Rooter Saves Money With Increased Productivity Of Mobile Printing Solution

By Printek

Trusted and recommended since 1935, Roto-Rooter is the premier provider of residential and commercial plumbing and drain cleaning services. Their network consists of 48 company-owned branch offices, over 60 contractor territories and 500 independent franchise operations. Roto-Rooter is the largest provider of complete commercial plumbing repair, sewer and drain services to large and small businesses across the U.S. and Canada.

Roto-Rooter Service Company employs over 1800 Service technicians and receives 5000 job request calls per day. This translates into a million calls annually network-wide.

Each technician handles an average of 2.5 jobs per day.

Prior to implementing their mobile solution, Roto-Rooter ran a manual transaction system. Armed with a pager, phone and 8.5x11 forms, the technician hand-wrote all estimates and job completion forms for each service call. All credit card payments were called in via phone by the technician. Pagers are used to locate the plumbers during the day and communicate deployment schedule changes.

When tasked with improving the productivity of it's "army" of technicians, the goal was obvious to Stephen Poppe, Chief Information Officer for Roto-Rooter: find ways that technology can reduce the amount of time between jobs.

"If your drain is overfl owing, you're not interested in waiting until tomorrow when we can more effi ciently route the job." Poppe said. "How do we get someone with the correct skills to your house in the least amount of time and how do we get them to the next job in the most timely manner?"