Company: SEQ Electrical, a commercial electrical services company
Cloud app: Dropbox
Savings: $5,000-$8,000 on server and server room
Since SEQ Electrical opened its doors two and a half years ago the Brisbane-based commercial electrical services company has grown to 35 staff working in northern NSW, the Gold Coast, Darwin as well as Brisbane.
The company’s staff were frequently on remote building sites which would have made it difficult to access documents stored in the head office.
In previous companies Kirk had dialled into a server kept in the office to access files. However, creating a remote connection on the move was always complicated.
“We used to find it was hard trying to hook onto the server. There was always dropouts and the firewall was always very protective. It was extremely slow as well,” says Matthew Kirk, owner of SEQ Electrical.
A file server and a server room would have cost between $5,000 to $8,000, Kirk says.
Kirk was advised to use cloud storage service Dropbox instead of buying a file server for the office. “We wanted to give everyone the same access to the information they needed, whether they were on a remote site or in the office. Dropbox seemed like a good option,” Kirk says.
Dropbox, which costs US$99 a year for 100 gigabytes of online file storage, can be viewed on a smartphone, tablet or through a web browser. It also stores a copy of all the files and folders on desktop and laptop computers. When files are changed, added or deleted, Dropbox updates all devices and computers simultaneously.
SEQ Electrical sets up a folder for each project which contains all correspondence, building plans, photos and other documents. Staff can look at documents while on a building site in Darwin or from the Brisbane office.
“The project manager might be out and he can log onto Dropbox and check out the drawings if he doesn’t have time to get back to the office,” Kirk says.
Kirk looks up files on his iPhone or iPad using the Dropbox app.
“I can look at it in Brisbane or people can look at it in Darwin in real time. I might be travelling to Melbourne and I can see everything live as long as I have an internet connection,” Kirk says.
Sharing files online makes it easy to follow up issues promptly.
“Say (SEQ staff) were doing some trenching and they wanted to check that the way they were backfilling it was correct,” Kirk says. The labourers can upload photos of the trenchwork to Dropbox and Kirk can advise them from Brisbane.
SEQ also uses Dropbox to review financial information such as the progress plan for a job.
“It’s much more accessible for everybody. Emails stay personal but Dropbox is a lot more shared and open,” Kirk says.
SEQ can give external partners such as contractors access to a specific folder in Dropbox without letting them see any other documents or folders. The company uses an estimator to cost up new jobs even though the estimator lives 200 kilometres away from the head office.
SEQ staff create a folder on Dropbox with plans, photos and location information and share it with the estimator who uses the documents to create a suggested price for the job.
Dropbox is also useful for sharing files too large to email. One supplier makes switchboards and often sends high-resolution drawings to SEQ. The supplier uploads the drawings to a Dropbox folder instead of sending the files by courier.
SEQ has much more information at hand in meetings with customers and suppliers. Kirk takes his iPad to a meeting and can look up hundreds of drawings on a job in Dropbox without needing to download or print them out first.
Kirk backs up files on Dropbox to a hard drive in the office. But when he had to restore some files he found it easier to use Dropbox’s online menu.
“One of our guys was working remotely and deleted a lot of files from Dropbox. It took me a matter of hours to log into the Dropbox website and reinstate those files. You just bring up the files and they all come back straight over,” Kirk says.
Image credit: SEQ Electrical (an airport customer)