THE PROBLEM

Our clients operate within the DeLaval dealer network in Ireland, serving dairy farmers with milking machine sales, installations, service and parts. Despite a strong reputation and a loyal customer base, the back-end of the dealership was running entirely on paper and spreadsheets – and it was costing them money every week.

Every invoice was written in a paper book. Every parts sale was tracked manually in Excel or on the back of a docket. Every service report was filled out on paper and handed to the farmer – who frequently lost it. Information fell through the cracks between visits and no one had a clear view of where a customer actually stood at any given moment.

Parts charging was a constant pressure point. Engineers would fit parts on a farm and forget to log them. Customers wouldn’t get charged. Money walked out the door every week and no one knew exactly how much.

Service history was another major gap. There was no system for tracking what had been fitted, what had been fixed or what a farmer had complained about last time. Every visit started from zero – engineers were rediagnosing the same problems they’d already solved six months earlier, wasting half a day at a time.

On the operational side, job scheduling was reactive and informal. Bookings went in a diary, on a whiteboard or in someone’s head. Engineers couldn’t check parts stock onsite without ringing the office or driving back to the yard.

OUR APPROACH & SOLUTION

We treated the dealership’s operation as a single connected system rather than a collection of paper books and spreadsheets and rebuilt it from the ground up – designed specifically for how DeLaval dealers work.

We started by building a customer account as the central hub. Every farmer now has their own account – every job, every service report, every part fitted, every invoice and every payment lives under one record. Office staff stopped digging through invoice books and started running the business from one screen.

Next, we built a mobile-first service report and parts logging system for engineers. Service reports are now completed on a phone, saved instantly under the customer account and a PDF goes to the farmer automatically. Every part fitted on a job is logged as it’s used – so nothing gets forgotten and nothing gets missed off the invoice.

We built a full invoicing and payment tracking system on top of the customer accounts. Invoices are pulled automatically from jobs and parts. Payments are tracked in real time. The dealership now knows exactly who owes what and how much is sitting out there at any moment.

We restructured parts management so stock levels are visible from anywhere – engineers can check parts availability from their phone on a farm without ringing the office and the dealership has live visibility on what’s in stock and what needs reordering.

In parallel, we built job scheduling and management into the same system so bookings stopped living on whiteboards and in heads. Every job is now scheduled, assigned and tracked through to completion under the customer account.

Finally, we built it all on infrastructure the dealership fully owns – their system, their data, their records, no subscriptions and no external dependencies.

RESULT & SATISFACTION

The dealership now operates a connected back-end where every customer has their own account, every job is tracked, every part is charged, every service report is saved, every invoice is raised and every payment is logged – all without manual chasing.

The team has full visibility across the business for the first time. Parts charges stopped slipping through the cracks. Engineers stopped rediagnosing the same problems. Service reports stopped getting lost. And the office stopped digging through paper books to figure out who owed what.

The dealership now has the infrastructure to keep growing without the operational drag of paper-based systems – and a customer record that gets more valuable with every job they complete. The system is built in a way that other DeLaval dealers across the network could adopt and run the same way.