BigChange

Pros

It is actually very simple to use, easy to set up but you will time to do it properly. The Big Change team are great and will support you. If you are looking for a cost effective solution for your business I would recommend this.

Cons

Data extraction for any business the data is so important, Big Change are working on this and once they get this right the product really sells it self.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing BigChange

Reasons for Switching to BigChange

Pros

- Invoicing
- Scheduling
- Fleet tracking (although this is starting to fail)
- Pricing

Cons

- Outrageously high costs to set up quoting documents.
- CRM systems constantly failing on job watch.
- System crashing when zooming into maps on phones / tablets.
- Not enough characters permitted within the quoting description. Some of our quotes are in excess of 5000 characters +. We end up having to send this as a separate schedule which isn't ideal.
- Starting to feel old and clunky.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing BigChange

Switched From

Pros

As a medium size company looking to change to a cloud based system we have tried bigchange extensively and found the following , positives
1. the scheduling of works is great , easy and well thought out
2. job cards with thumbs up or down is a good concept
3. road crew ( tech help) are quick to answer the phone and help where they can .

Cons

Negatives
1. Compared to our current system the back office Reporting is very underpowered .
2. Job cards have to have a Job type assigned to them this means in our case 600 job type! which became unusable.
3. If you do not set up everything exactly as you need it at the beginning of using Bigchange if is incredibly tedious to change things later on.
4. Financials within Bigchange are poorly handled ie job costings are very difficult to get right and invoice off .
5. Subcontractors are not handled at all in bigchange, you have to have work arounds to allow the use of subcontractors even then its messy and poor.
6. If you deal with NHF Sor codes then your in trouble as Bigchange cannot , does not have a way to easily use these , there are workarounds but you will not end up with a usable system for office and engineers , even worse if like us you have 3 / 4 different versions to pull codes from .
7. The scheduling is good but it gets very unclear very quickly when you have more then 100 jobs a day to plan and manage , in the end we reverted to our whiteboards for clarity ! this is not just a bigchange issue all other systems we have tried are

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to BigChange

Pros

It's allowed us to completely remove paper meaning we are far more efficient and effective in scheduling in work and optimising our technicians days. Our customer care [sensitive content hidden] is really attentive and understanding with regular visits, something other workforce management systems don't offer.

Cons

The user interface is quite clunky and old looking, it could do with an update as it isn't overly intuitive making it harder for new staff in the office to learn. The lack of accounting integration into the sage cloudbased software means we don't invoice or use the financial side. We integrate the system with a client meaning they can allocate us jobs however this is also clunky and dated.

Pros

As a company being able to send digital certs to clients through the automatic sending feature has save us many hours of admin labour. This has meant we can concentrate on other admin that can at times be left behind in priority. The live data and tracking and knowing where our resources are takes the guess work out of the job. Being able to add stock items through Job Watch is a major plus. Knowing what stock we have available and what the resources have on their vehicles is something we never had before so has made scheduling and ordering a much more streamlined experience.

Cons

I would like to be able to customise by view in some areas not already available. Some reporting could be improved.