Riggotts Revolutionary IT System Short-Listed For Industry Award

A revolutionary software system that has more than doubled Riggotts’ turnover has led to the company being shortlisted for a prestigious IT award. The company’s bespoke ROADS software system has been nominated for the annual Computer Magazine Awards for Excellence. Riggotts commissioned a local software house to build the programme in 2003, to automate a significant amount of the line-marking company’s business processes and to deal with the extra paperwork.

The software resulted in the company’s turnover doubling – without the need to employ additional members of staff. Darren Riggott, managing director, said: “Without this system we would have had to employ at least another five or six people, simply to cope with the increased paperwork. “It enables us to generate and track quotations quickly and convert them to orders with a single click. We can also produce detailed job sheets for field operatives, input return sheets from the installations and generate invoices. It’s invaluable.” The software also manages HR data, vehicle and plant assets and maintenance, purchase ordering and stock control – as well as staff training and health and safety records.

Darren added: “It has helped the company to control its expansion and it has allowed us to reinvest the revenue generated from increased sales into more plants and equipment to service our growing customer base. “We’’ve also been able to take on more customer service staff at our Tuxford head office to ensure our clients receive the best customer care, both before and after-sales. A recent innovation to the system came in the form of an electronic planning board, devised to match the company’’s old magnetic white-board system as closely as possible. The result is a self-scaling matrix screen with columns for each lining vehicle and rows for seven days of the week.

The display integrates into the order records and maintains colour-coded cells for each truck’s operations on a weekly basis, allowing greater forward planning and reviewing than the previous manual system. The system also ties into the company’s use of the Masternaut vehicle tracking system, which enables the planning department to verify that each job is on target in real-time.