Managing the progress of jobs simply and efficiently is essential for any company or organisation whether they are manufacturing goods or providing services. Simple, clear and proven workflow systems are likely to be most effective which is why manual display card systems are commonplace, like those supplied by T Cards Direct. However, for some workflow management applications, particularly those where staff may be working off-site,  the benefits of online access are very important.

A logical development was for T Cards Direct to apply their extensive experience and  produce an online version of their successful manual based T Card Board & Card system,  hence T Cards Online was launched in 2010. T Cards Online enables users to manage workflow in real time using the simple drag-and-drop technique, moving cards around the ‘online board’ to reflect current status. 5 years on and T Cards Online has been established as the market leading online workflow monitoring system benefitting hundreds of customers across the UK.      

A good example of where T Cards Online has been used successfully is at Kent based HMC Compliance Ltd a leading Electrical Testing company, who provide a compliance service to government departments, facilities management companies and large blue chip organisations throughout the UK. HMC had benefitted from using the manual T Card system for many years, although were considering the merits of an online system for more sophisticated monitoring of their wide range of services.

Sarah Cornwell at HMC Compliance Ltd explained, ‘Whilst we could monitor the progress of jobs, we were looking for a system that could give us an idea financially of how we were doing as a company against projected budgets throughout each month. Also, things could be easily wiped off the board and we needed the facility to move jobs from one engineer to another”.   

HMC considered approaches from other suppliers of online monitoring systems but decided these to be not as professional or as user-friendly as T Cards Online. Consequently they purchased 10 licenses from T Cards Online in July 2015 and this has subsequently increased to 25 as they have rolled out the system across the company.   

When asked about the benefits of using the T Cards Online system, Sarah explained, “There are many benefits. For example we can see financially where we are at any point throughout the month, we have quite a large touch screen board in the office which we can all stand around and discuss. All our engineers have access / logins to the T Card system enabling them to view the T Cards on the scheduling board, but are unable to edit anything. This negates the need for the administrators to send out a weekly timesheet to them and therefore saves us time in the Operations Department. Also, we can run off reports and get figures at any time and moving jobs to different engineers is easy, we simply click and drag”.

Sarah added, “The fact that anyone can log in at anytime from anywhere as long as they have an internet connection means they can see exactly where they need to be and the facility to be able to run reports on all scheduled jobs, is a real bonus. Also, the staff at T Cards have been very helpful and accommodating, we have visited their offices and they are constantly developing and fine-tuning the software to our requirements.   

HMC Compliance’s experience in using the new online system is another example of T Cards Online expertise in helping a wide range of companies to explore the benefits of a simple, yet highly effective online management tool. The result is more efficient job management with easy on-line access along with more detailed financial information which is invaluable to cost-control