Resource planning, resource scheduling, project management: How Timewatch and Whitespace® keep the food industry supply chain moving
Masterleo: food and dairy industry service provider, based near Columbus, Ohio
THE CLIENT
Masterleo, located near Columbus, Ohio, services the food and dairy industry across North America with a team of technicians maintaining some of the most important equipment used along the supply chain.
Customers include giant Fortune 500 companies such as Nestle, Unilever, Kroger, and Dean Foods – businesses that produce and deliver some of the most popular products found in homes around the world.
To work with these clients, Masterleo needs to be highly efficient and organized with its own scheduling and planning.
“Because we are covering such a broad geographic area all of our service trips are planned out,” explains Masterleo’s Brian Henry.
“We usually set our calendar several months in advance. We need to know where we are going next week and the week after. If a customer calls with an emergency situation we need to plug them in to open spots.”
THE CHALLENGE
Masterleo is a longtime user of Wallchart® for Windows, a legacy resource scheduling product from Timewatch. To better meet current needs, the company upgraded to Whitespace®, a Timewatch premium resource scheduling and planning package.
“Wallchart® had shaped how we do our scheduling and how we communicate with our technicians,” says Masterleo’s Brian Henry.
Smartly, Masterleo also considered other options in the resource scheduling software market but recognized that Timewatch was the best resource scheduling product available for the company’s highly-demanding and specific needs.
“For us it is not, ‘Yeah, whatever’,” says Henry.
“It has got to work and it has got to meet our needs perfectly.”
THE TIMEWATCH BENEFIT
Upgrading to Whitespace® – Timewatch’s resource scheduling and planning service – opened the door to many new features that enhanced Masterleo’s ability to run its own business efficiently.
“The new system works the same way as the old one – which is important – but there are some new features,” explains Brian Henry.
“Whitespace® offers the ability to view resource schedules from any web browser. Previously, logging in to our remote server, in order to view Wallchart®, was hard to see and hard to navigate on a mobile device.
“WhiteSpace® is much easier to use than Wallchart® and can be used with any browser from anywhere, on any device.
“I think most of our guys will end up using Whitespace® on their iPads although if they need to log in from their phone it is also super easy.”
“It was a big decision to upgrade because our scheduling program is a key business system. For what we do, our scheduling software is just as important as the financial software.”