The Company
Blomfield Signs create exceptional signage for inside and outside buildings and vehicles across the country with contracts including Ricoh, Plumbing World, Leigh’s Construction, Kate Sylvester and Moochi to name a few. Blomfields have eight permanent staff and a large pool of subcontractors across New Zealand.
The Blomfield story begins way back in the 1950s, with Val Blomfield as foreman of one of Auckland’s largest sign shops at the time; N.A. SUCKLING LTD. Val’s son, Colin Blomfield, was also serving his apprenticeship at Sucklings with his father. But in 1955, the Suckling building was sold and Mr. Suckling decided to close the sign business.
Colin suggested to his father Val that they go it alone, and so on 21st November 1955, a new company, Blomfield Signs Ltd, was formed. As business picked up for Blomfield Signs they advanced to a bigger space in Grey Lynn, before building Auckland’s first “purpose built” sign studio.
Blomfield Signs has been in business ever since, nationally known for their honesty, integrity and quality. Blomfield Signs has been an enthusiastic supporter of the NZ Sign and Display Association, in which Val and Colin were founding members, later, each serving as president for two years and both honoured with life memberships for their services to the sign industry.
Over the many years since the company was formed it has won numerous International and national awards including “Sign of the Year”. Since 1955, over 40 apprentices were trained, many of whom went on to form their own successful sign companies.
It is currently run by one of those apprentices, owner Jonathan Maitland who served his apprenticeship under the Blomfields 40 years ago.
The Challenge
With such a strong heritage it would have been easy to keep doing things as they had always been done. But not the Blomfield team. With their focus on quality and excellent customer service, Jonathan and Office Manager Mel recognised that traditional paper-based systems no longer cut it. Paper was inefficient, time consuming and caused a massive amount of duplication.
The signage boys would use books for timesheets and all jobs were handwritten by Jonathan and Zane.” Explains Mel. “It meant I had to get the boys’ job books, transcribe their written jobs into Word and then manage it from there. But often they’d forget to write in their book or their writing was undecipherable – which would give us massive admin headaches. Not to mention the amount of time it consumed.”
Mel thought “There’s got to be a better way.”
Conclusion
With NextMinute, Blomfield Signs got instant job access, they can now allocate time immediately, do quoting, job tracking, timesheets, and invoices are fully integrated with Xero.
“The boys love the efficiency of the immediate updates. They can whack a job in and come back to it later as needed. And a noted bonus, they don’t have to twink anything!”
Change management has also been improved upon by ensuring all changes are accounted for meaning the clients don’t get any surprise and no money is left on the table.
When asked what the Blomfield team thought of NextMinute, Mel simply replied; “We love NextMinute.”
