DORCHESTER swimming pool, spas and hot tub company Cresta Leisure has benefitted from the business support service.

Engineers have started using tablets to help them work when they are servicing and installing pools and hot tubs.

Director Simon Bareham said he couldn’t believe it was a free service.

“I thought: ‘Where’s the catch’ – I always think if you’re offering me something it’s going to cost me, but it was free.

“They looked at our processes and IT systems. We had a very elaborate Lotus system and everything was very fragmented.

“They pulled me away from the daily grind and made me assess the IT from outside the box rather than inside. It starts to open your mind up to technology and making information available to the engineers from the office.

“We put all the information onto the cloud and we can access it.

“It speeds up our process so the engineer can instantly send back a photo of damage that needs repairing.

“It’s been so good to have that expertise helping us to do this.”

Simon estimates that for an investment of £2,500 to £3,000 in tablets for the engineers and some software upgrades, the business will save around £10,000 a year in recovered hours, including office staff who will no longer need to spend time reconciling information manually.

Simon said he is convinced that without the advice and input from Superfast Business, he wouldn’t have been moving down the tablet route so soon.

He confesses to having a tablet phobia, preferring the familiarity of desktop systems.

But the consultation brought the rapid recent changes in tablet technology to his attention, and he will be signing up for one of Superfast Business’s tablet familiarisation sessions so that the Cresta team can see what else the devices could do for the business.