KnowledgeNet.ai Boosts Productivity and Profit Margins at a Growing Consulting Firm
Disaster-Smart Inspection Consulting
Industry: Insurance, Inspection & Consulting
Location: Cantonment, FL
Employees: 25
Customer since: 2022
KnowledgeNet solutions:
- iFormBuilder Integration
- Structured Data
- Knowledge Sharing
- Relationship Intelligence
- Executive Oversight
Disaster Smart (DSCI) is an inspection and consulting company offering a full suite of products to its clients to help them identify and mitigate risks affecting the resiliency and insurability of buildings in coastal communities. In eleven years, they have expanded their coverage area from coastal counties in NW Florida to Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. They attribute their success to their 200+ years of combined construction industry experience, commitment to using only licensed, insured, and trained inspectors, and their openness to innovative management solutions. This nationally recognized industry leader uses KnowledgeNet to access property history in one place, eliminate repetitive work and extra steps, and drive productivity.
Challenge
Disaster Smart’s inspectors take home inspection to the next level, going beyond code compliance to help building buyers make smart decisions and owners prepare for weathering environmental calamities. Their teams use multiple sources, from physical inspections to public and subscription data, to create hyper-detailed reports valued by clients in the insurance, real estate development, and non-profit industries as well as private homeowners.
While their team has access to the best available data, they were spending way too much time running multiple searches to get everything needed from siloed sources, recreating work they could no longer access, and manually building year-over-year comparisons between property reports. They also lacked a system for sharing, organizing, and preserving property notes independent of inspection reports.
KnowledgeNet.ai gives us greater search power, providing a complete inventory of our internal knowledge.
Solution
Comparing Products
Disaster Smart is no stranger to using technology to collect the best information possible. They utilize multiple iFormBuilder databases, CompanyCam, Grasshopper VOIP and messaging system, Form Stack Documents, Form Stack Sign, and Dropbox as well as web searches and public records databases to source, document, and store information. What they still missed was the ability to connect and compare what it knew or to universally search the data by property address. KnowledgeNet gives Disaster Smart a way to connect and search data points, compare notes, and analyze structured data for audit and other purposes.
Map Relationships Between Data
Disaster Smart’s data-driven approach means that team members sift through thousands of records to find the information they need for the property they are working on. Different databases use different key fields as unique identifiers. Disaster Smart associates struggled to link related reports based on their preferred single common denominator, the property address.
KnowledgeNet connects to all external data streams and builds structure around them by automatically creating a record for each incoming property address and then associating submitted inspection reports to that record. In just two months, KnowledgeNet has created X property records and catalogued over 4,200 inspection reports. Now associates can search using an address and gain access to every inspection report done for that property, spanning years. Being able to access previous reports with a simple address search also allows inspectors to reuse existing schematics and diagrams, saving them from recreating work and giving them back time that can be spent fitting more inspections into a day.
KnowledgeNet.ai’s solution moves information out of silos. The software brings that information to the forefront as consolidated data that keeps our company from recreating past work and allows us to make sure our reporting is consistent with historical data.
Compare Notes
It is common for Disaster Smart schedulers to want to pass along important messages to inspectors preparing to examine a property and for inspectors to find conditions that contradict those in property records. Their existing scheduling system did not have a capture and keep this information going forward.
In addition to creating records for each property address, KnowledgeNet provides a way to have conversations and preserve them to the correct property record, so that individuals working together on inspections can coordinate and collaborate. Each property record includes space for exchanging messages and comments, sharing attachments, and accessing files on their Dropbox shared drive.
Analyze Structured Data
Once inspectors have performed their jobs, auditors step in to certify the results. A big part of their job involves finding and analyzing changes in year-over-year data. Using an API-level integration to connect KnowledgeNet with previously siloed databases gives auditors a single-screen view for data comparisons.
Bringing that information to the forefront as consolidated data makes it easier for auditors to ensure that inspection reports are accurate and consistent with historical data and allows them to certify them more quickly.
KnowledgeNet.ai expands our intelligence, streamlines our work, and helps us win new customers.
Win New Clients
Like most businesses, Disaster Smart is always looking at ways to expand its client base. One untapped resource was Disaster Smart’s own emails. The sender and recipient information stored in emails is an overlooked source of relationship intelligence that can answer questions such as who one knows at a company, what other companies have they done business with, and who is the best source for an introduction.
Using KnowledgeNet, Disaster Smart associates simply connected their email addresses to automatically create account and contact records and begin tracking relationships between those individuals and companies. So far KnowledgeNet has analyzed 93,262 emails, created 1,655 account and 5,296 contact records, and traced the interactions between them—a task that would take a person years to accomplish manually. Now Disaster Smart has a visual map of who they have done business with and what new opportunities were buried in those connections.
KnowledgeNet.ai will allow our inspectors to perform more inspections per day, and our auditors will be able to certify the results faster. We project an increase in productivity of 10-20% without increasing overhead or staffing needs. This means we can produce more work, and more revenue, at a higher profit margin.
Results
With KnowledgeNet.ai to collect, connect, structure, and preserve data, Disaster Smart can expand capacity without expanding its head count, a winning combination for any business’ bottom line.
