Gruntify draws on power of cloud for facilities management solutions

Gruntify, a smart data collection and collaboration platform built on Microsoft Azure, helps enterprise users turn awkward, unwieldy and often manual processes into an elegant set of logical and well-organised activities. Gruntify was created to better meet rapidly growing demand for integrated data capture and task management applications across organisations in the Government, Utilities and Environment sectors.

When we first came up with the concept of Gruntify, little did we know how beneficial our choice to host the platform on the cloud would be.

Gruntify was born out of a Queensland state-run Open Innovation Challenge, where the government were seeking a solution for streamlined data capture and task management.  The Gruntify team pitched and then developed a Microsoft Azure-based data capture app and workflow engine, with geographic distribution of work management via mobile and web.

Fast forward two years, and Gruntify is now a mature product stepping out to the global market. During a recent trip to the Middle East organised by Trade and Investment Queensland, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Dubai-based facilities management powerhouse, Duserve.

Duserve easily saw the multiple benefits Gruntify could bring – both to themselves and their customers. Gruntify has an agile data capture workflow that is highly suited to facilities management. A native smartphone/tablet app lets field users quickly upload new reports, which are submitted in real-time to an Azure cloud-hosted data management portal. The real smarts are in this portal, where office personnel manage, map and action incoming data. Azure’s spatial data capabilities are leveraged to ensure only geographically-relevant data is available to individual users.

Importantly for Duserve, mobile users of Gruntify can capture information, photos and videos to report issues with their assets, such as broken air conditioning, a blown light-bulb, or a leaking pipe. Uploading this to the Gruntify web portal in real-time means that administrators can quickly send jobs out through Gruntify to contractors to fix these issues. The contractors also receive all of the captured information in real time, assisting them to fix the problem even before they get to the site.

This can save thousands of work hours by streamlining the process from reporting to fixing a problem, with no paper required.

Duserve have now identified a number of projects for which Gruntify would be highly beneficial and help them improve efficiencies, including management of maintenance issues across hospitals, schools, shopping centres, the aviation industry, and more.

We are pleased to be able to provide Duserve with a platform that can grow and scale around their requirements with relative ease. The entire project infrastructure is there on the cloud without the need for Duserve’s users to install or develop any software internally. Being cloud-based, standing up new projects is an easy exercise of defining forms and implementing them through an online drag and drop interface, then providing them instantaneously to field users. No programming is needed, and we can implement it right here from Queensland – although the occasional trip to Dubai is fine by us too!

In addition to convenience and cost effectiveness, Gruntify’s Azure base offers our customers important flexibility and security. Microsoft Azure’s pay-as-you-go model also means Gruntify can quickly be scaled up or down to match the customer’s demand with per-minute billing. And that’s a real art.

But Gruntify’s applications don’t stop at facilities management. It is being used by other customers in projects as diverse as water management in Townsville City Council to jaguar conservation by Queensland University of Technology in the Amazon. And our presence in Dubai now puts us in pole position for projects around World Expo 2020 and the World Cup 2020. We can’t wait!