The Situation: 

A leading large retailer had thousands of installed exit signs that were expiring. They were required to provide a complete inventory within 90 days so they could properly dispose and replace them. They turned to Solis Facility Solutions, a leading provider of lighting and electrical services to deliver a solution.

The Challenge:   

With approximately 1500 locations across the country, the home improvement retailer had over 30,000 exit signs that were quickly nearing their expiration dates. Before they could be replaced, the retailer needed to conduct field audits to inventory all the exit signs and report the results for each location within 90 days.  

Historically, this type of inventory project could take 9 months due to the high number of geographically dispersed locations, reliance on multiple 3rd party contractors, and manual process of using clipboards, scanners and faxes or emails to get the resulting surveys to a central location.  Further, this approach often resulted in significant rework, lost data, poor accuracy, and haphazard implementation. 

The Solution: 

• Solis understood a manual, paper-based approach would not work 
• Solis turned to Qmerit, a leading provider of workforce management solutions that has digitized a variety of manual workflows, including HVAC site surveys, commercial and residential EV charging installation estimating, energy efficiency surveys and more. 
• To meet the aggressive timeline: 
  • Solis developed a nationwide workforce of temporary workers and employees to complete the inventory surveys 
  • Developed a digital survey on smartphones and tablets that guided technicians through the inventory process and captured all required information -- eliminating rework and dramatically reducing the time and costs associated with managing thousands of handwritten scanned responses 
  • Solis centrally managed the project using Qmerit’s workforce management platform, which enabled them to efficiently schedule the 1,500+ surveys to over 75+ technicians and receive survey results in real-time 

The Results: 

• Due to digital automation, Solis reduced the time to complete the project by 67% -- from 9 months to 90 days and met the home improvement retailer’s deadline and budget. 
• Eliminated all rework that often happens with paper-based surveys and significantly reduced the costs associated with managing thousands of handwritten scanned responses        
• The retailer was impressed with the innovative solution from Solis and said it was the most accurate inventory they’ve seen 
• Solis was awarded a significant amount of the disposal and replacement business