Innovation – JGF Electrical

Innovation

COW Charging – ahead of the herd

12Jun2025

COWs, or Computers on Wheels as some of the large distribution centres name them, are complicated, hard-working beasts which, if not treated right, well maintained, and have regular visits from the vet, become unruly, agitated, and not fit for purpose.

It’s not the milk yield that drops, but the work yield and risk to health and safety.

So, is this a familiar story? Do you ditch and replace, or maintain safely and efficiently to protect the lifespan of the asset?

Enhanced Safety

We eliminate risks before they become hazards. By repairing or replacing damaged cables and terminations, and PAT testing all electrical equipment, we reduce the chance of electrical faults and improve workplace safety.

Reduce Downtime

Proactive servicing means fewer unexpected failures. With workstations consistently operational, your team stays productive without interruptions.

Extended Equipment Lifespan

Regular preventative maintenance ensures your workstations stay in optimal condition for longer. Many units are unnecessarily discarded when proper servicing could have significantly extended their usability.

On Site Repairs, No Hassle

JGF Electrical carries a full range of spare parts (including wheels, inverters, Anderson leads, and more), allowing us to complete most repairs on-site. This means your equipment is back in service quickly, with minimal downtime.

Compliance & Documentation

After every service, you’ll receive a detailed report for each workstation, including a PAT test certificate and a log of any defects. Our scheduled quarterly inspections are planned around your peak periods, ensuring minimal disruption. Service documents and compliance records are conveniently available on our Customer Portal.

Customer Portal.

For more information on the portal, click here.

Innovation

JGF Real-Time Customer Portal

3Dec2024

Supporting an Efficient Partnership

Introduction

Amongst other management tools, processes and systems, we employ SimPRO to support our business logistics. It drives efficiency right across all management disciplines and its systematic benefit to JGF in turn, delivers systematic benefits to customers. It’s a digital power tool that supports everything we do, nose to tail.

The Portal facility is a one-stop hub. A real-time collection of information pertaining to every single aspect of every job we carry out for customers.

This level of accessibility and convenience, delivers an even better customer experience and also gives users an additional, centralised control platform. It is an open platform for transparency and trust between operating partners.

A summary of mutual benefits:

Pricing & Quotation

When surveying a job to quote, our engineer(s) inspect the task to be priced (see ‘What Makes a Great Quote’ HERE), taking and adding images to help itemised pricing and support the quotation itself. They can add notes, material lists, measurements, documents, all from site, or at any time afterward. General notes and any other details are added to support the images. Quotations are detailed, accurate and pragmatic, planning the delivery of the optimum solution.

Inventory Management

The system helps manage inventory in real-time, from anywhere, giving stock visibility to the office and the field. We know what we have in stock, where it is located and when it’s running low. This reduces down-time on site, avoiding last-minute trips to the wholesaler, and re-allocates stock to a van, job, site or order ahead of time.

Supplier Catalogues

We sync. vendor catalogues to the system to ensure we have up-to-date material costs. ‘Compare the supplier’ (almost) ensures the best price every time, with the ability to request and view multiple suppliers’ pricing side-by-side. The system easily groups catalogue items according to product line or functional type and assigns them to a job or project.

JGF Catalogue

The extension to Inventory Management is Catalogue Supply Management offering customers a ready source of materials to order direct from JGF for other non-tasked maintenance and development work.

Scheduling & Dispatch

SimPRO enables us to manage our assets completely and effectively. It schedules team availability, job allocation, site attendance and timing. As well as JGF engineers being in the right place at the right time, they have the equipment they need.

We benefit, so you benefit more.

YOUR PERSONALISED SERVICE PORTAL

Our customer portal uses the job management software enabling customers to easily and securely view quotes, jobs, invoices and account statement; view job details for each stage of delivery; and view and edit site and contact details.

Log into your confidential service portal to access the real-time information you need to manage your own workload, making it simpler, quicker and more efficient.

JGF tailor reporting to suit your needs, including:

Initial quotations by job.
PO allocations.
RAMS and other H&S proforma allocated by job.
Job start, progress, status, completion, QC Certification.
Invoicing.
By Job, by week, by month, quarter, year reporting and summary.
Confidential project management.
Team comments, suggestions, proposals, improvements.
Related notes and contact / reporting resources.

Innovation

Advantages of LED Lighting

8Mar2023

Environmental and Financial

Over the past decade, LED lighting has proved itself to be a simple efficiency to reduce the long-term impact on the environment and minimize the burden of hefty electricity expenses.

LED lights create the same, or better, illumination as conventional lighting sources, yet use less than half the energy. So, whilst there are upfront costs of instillation, those costs are recoupable within an effective period of time. Industrial facilities that install LED lighting also benefit from lower maintenance and repair costs.

We recently installed LED lighting in corridors and key classrooms of a local school.
During our routine QC check, a year head (unprompted) said – ‘it’s amazing! They’ve only been back a few days and they seem happier, more attentive, more alive and I feel exactly the same too – this really does work’. You really couldn’t have better feedback that that.

If you would like JGF to conduct a FREE LED Efficiency Survey, please ask via the contact page on our website – HERE (regional conditions apply).

How could this we help? Simple. The survey will equip you with a schedule of benefits including the following:

Replacement of luminaires to more energy efficient LED.
Reducing unnecessary lighting with accurate design. This can include lower output lighting as well as the removal and relocating fittings.
Use of intelligent lighting enabling dimming and better light management.
Better lighting control using photocell, timers, occupancy and movement sensors.
Emergency lighting making sure your property is safe and compliant.

Key Benefits

Alongside financial benefits, the environmental case for LED lighting is strong. LEDs help businesses shrink their environmental footprint while improving their bottom-line.

Environmental Benefits

Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) associated with the LED lights are considerably lower than conventional incandescent or Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs).

According to careful calculations, one LED bulb, providing the same luminosity as one incandescent bulb, emits 80% less greenhouse gases. The same calculation for CFLs suggests a reduction of 50% GHGs by switching to LED lights.

Example

Joe (MD & Founder) said: “At half term (last) we fitted out part of a local school, installing LED lighting in corridors and key classrooms.

During our routine QC check on the installation after a week, a year head (without prompting) stopped me and said – ‘it’s amazing!

They’ve only been back a few days and they seem happier, more attentive, more alive and I feel exactly the same too – this really does work’.

You really couldn’t want better feedback that that.”

Energy Efficiency

LED lights are more energy efficient. They conserve up to 80% more energy than traditional lighting such as fluorescent and incandescent. 95% of the energy in LEDs is converted into light and only 5% is wasted as heat. Whereas fluorescent lights convert 95% of energy to heat and only 5% into light, and 50% as compared to CFLs.

Furthermore, low energy consumption reduces the load on electric power plants, which in turn reduces the amount of fuel being burnt to generate electricity.

Heat Loss

As well as reducing light pollution, one of the most environmentally friendly aspects of LED lighting is that these lights have very high electricity to light conversion efficacy, as high as 90% in most cases.

This high conversion efficiency means that there is minimal heat loss in the environment.

Harmful Chemicals

Compact fluorescent lights have 4 to 5 milligrams of mercury present in each of them. Such chemical hazards are absent from LED lights which are free of any chemical which can be hazardous for the environment or public health.

Others

As well as these benefits, others include the fact they have a long life; they are good for plant growth and, insects are not drawn towards the light.

In short

If you couple your LED lights with an energy management system you can make your entire businesses energy consumption even lower. With smart controls and sensors energy management systems reduce your bills and in turn also allow you to have a smaller carbon footprint.

Innovation

An ‘issue’ is a system in waiting. Workflow Management

21Nov2022

As a fast-growing business servicing large and diverse electrical contracts, we were more than ready to develop systems to support the operation.

Workflow optimisation. It’s a phrase thrown around regularly in businesses, especially in those that rely on a structured process of jobs to be completed by multiple people in multiple locations.

The main goal is to:

improve the efficiency of staff,
put the right people on the right projects,
increase productivity and
free up more time for high-value tasks.

Why?

To reduce / eliminate duplicated efforts
The simplify / improve workflow management
Improve client services / relations / retention
To price / quote / tender accurately and effectively
To generate POs / Invoicing, supporting speedy / accurate accounting / payment.

How?

Well, it needed two parallel strategies to effect such automation or semi-automation needed to achieve the above.

First, we had to analyse the work, people, clients, goals and all the components that make the business work … Traction

Equal first (because the two need to work in sync), we had to introduce and begin to implement an effective system to manage the issues arising from ‘Traction’ … SimPRO.

We have written about the massive changes that our Traction journey has and continues to deliver. Rock after rock of ambitious targets are being allocated, owned, and ‘smashed’. Each, a massive and positive contribution to sustainable growth. See ‘Business Management – Traction & Vision’.

SimPRO

Today we want to develop the crucial part that SimPRO plays in creating the ‘back office’ systems that support operational management.

Like everything new, there was a lot of head scratching – where to start, how to start, where to finish. The suggested benefits were attractive – to track jobs from start to finish with features for scheduling, quoting, costing, invoicing, and more – so much more.

The efforts were, are and continue to be more that worth the effort. We know precisely what stocks we hold (and where), what’s allocated to each vehicle, to each job, where everyone is, the materials they’re using and, again, so much more besides.

With excellent guidance from SimPRO and dedication from staff, each member of the JGF Team is now ‘on SimPRO’ with field staff (Apprentices and Electricians alike) having this and other support systems on personal, bespoke tablets.

Ricky Campitelli from SimPRO said: “…it’s great to have a client so prepared not just to implement SimPRO, but actually push the boundaries to develop new systems. The power is in SimPRO, but it needs forward thinking to use the systems to their full effect.

It’s textbook stuff, but we might have to re-write the textbook soon!”

Thank you Ricky.

Every day’s a school day

If you finish your day without having learned something new, you have wasted the day.

With SimPRO, you build systems bespoke to you, your business and operational goals, from templates pre-charged with great examples for your specific industry needs – in this case top end electrical contracting.

Guidance helped develop the structure and reposting, yet every page has a ‘facility tab’ that just needs pressing to see what it does. Make time to learn and you will learn quickly.

Like all things however, the more you learn the more you discover that you want to learn, apply and develop. Joe has become the prime example of this – filling gaps to create new gaps.

Push those buttons, push those boundaries, and you start to drive SimPRO – the tool – rather than endure SimPRO – the chore.

Innovation

Team Talk 1

10Sep2022

Anyone who knows JGF knows that the power of teamwork is paramount. Operating, training, working and playing as a respectful team is the driving force, so talking to The Team is crucial – hence, Team Talk: