How PFE Limited cut report prep time by 50% with interactive dashboards

50% decrease in report time

+1 extra job per month

About

PFE Limited, is a family-owned business operating for 19 years, with over 30 years of experience in reliability based engineering. Specialising in vibration analysis, balancing, alignment and other related reliability services.

Industry

MANUFACTURING

USE CASES

Project Management
Client Portal
Integrations

“I can basically do anything I want with it. If I can think of what I want, then I can build it. It might take me a couple of iterations of how I want to structure the data initially, but I think that’s the flexibility of a no-code platform like Noloco."
— Jake Ford, CAT IV Vibration Analyst, PFE Limited

The Company

PFE serves the B2B market across the UK, Ireland and Europe, priding itself on bespoke offerings and commitment to reducing down-time, increasing operational efficiencies for their clients.

Jake Ford, a Reliability Engineer and CAT IV Vibration Analyst at PFE Limited, is a huge part of their team’s success, always looking to stay ahead of the curve and improve their customer experience and team’s efficiency.

“I’ve tried, Softr, I've tried Stacker and a few others. Each one has their own ups and downs. Either they had limited customization, or it just wasn't suiting what I needed."

The Challenge

As PFE Limited took on more customers, Jake realized they needed a more interactive and engaging reporting system. Traditional PDF reports, which are the standard means of reporting in their industry, were time-consuming to prepare and lacked any interactivity. Jake knew clients preferred filters and drill-downs to truly understand their results and that offering interactive reports can cater to different stakeholders’ preferences, with customizable views and offer a different perspective on the results.

Jake and his team faced challenges customizing other platforms for their customer’s unique reporting needs. They ran into limitations with both functionality and branding using Airtable Interfaces, their existing solution.

They needed a solution that could provide real-time updates, ease of access to data, and customizable views for different stakeholders, all through a white-labeled portal that was easy to share and access.

“We had a really good uptake in our digital style reports. There's no split reporting, and everyone knows exactly when their asset was last checked."

The Solution

With Noloco, Jake saw an opportunity to revolutionize their reporting system. Noloco's flexibility and ease of use allowed PFE Limited to design custom solutions without hiring a software engineer - something he often considered, but couldn’t justify. Jake could tailor everything in Noloco from UI elements and permissions to suit both their engineers and their customers.

This created a more personalized and efficient reporting process that saves them hours each week. Each update to Noloco’s app builder makes their custom apps even better, aligning perfectly with PFE’s reporting needs.

“A report for one of these customers used to take me nearly all day. I can trim that to say three or four hours with Noloco”

In a matter of weeks, Noloco transformed PFE Limited’s reporting system, saving their team a huge amount of time by automating report creation and more importantly, allowing report data to be displayed in various formats at once. Jake found that different customers had different visualization preferences, something they couldn’t accommodate with a PDF, at least not without doubling or tripling the work involved.

“In Engineering, communication is key. With a PDF, in the past, you'd have to comment, send it back. Someone would have to read it, comment, send it back again. When you've got live comments, it’s like having a live feed of information."

The Results

The custom dashboards in their Noloco apps provided real-time updates and significantly improved overall efficiency and communication with clients. Instead of sending quarterly reports, machine data is updated as it’s calculated, so PFE’s customers can have near real-time updates on their reports. Jake’s team can now focus more on their Engineering service and less on back-office processes. Jake says that introducing custom client apps has led to an improvement in client satisfaction while also streamlining internal operations, but more importantly, it allows them to bid for and take on more jobs.

“The hours saved can add up to take on another job per month.”

60-70% of PFE Limited’s regular customers have moved over to their custom Noloco app. If Jake ever receives a "complaint" from a customer, he edits the report in the platform and gives it to the customer in a matter of minutes, and often rolls that change out to all of his other customer apps.