Waste Connections is the third-largest garbage hauler in the United States. They provide commercial dumpster and roll-off container rental for construction sites across the country. To ensure they are paid for these services, protecting their lien rights is key.
To aid in the lien rights process, Ayla Gokturk, the Regional Credit and Collections Manager for the west coast division, uses Levelset to track lien notice deadlines and ensure the company remains compliant with lien laws across the 10 states she oversees.
In the last few years, Ayla’s experience with Levelset went from great to amazing since she made the decision to automate the notice process. Read the case study below to learn more.
The challenge
Ayla believes in sending notices as a form of security.
“I always say, when in doubt, send it out. The only reason a contractor should be upset that you sent a notice is because they didn’t intend to pay you in the first place,” says Ayla.
However, sending notices on almost every job across the 10 states Ayla manages is time-consuming — even with a full team in place to help with the process. While Ayla and her team were successfully using Levelset to help with tracking deadlines and sending out notices with verified property information, the process they were using was still manual, since they entered each job individually.
Ayla knew that using Levelset, she could automate notices and set rules so they would be queued up and sent automatically. But she needed to sync job information from their system to Levelset for this to work.
“Even though Levelset could speak to our system through API, our corporate IT department decided that we wouldn’t open up our system to API. So, we would set up our customer accounts in our system, and then turn around and load them into Levelset as new projects. We did this on about 350-400 accounts per year,” explains Ayla.
Manually setting up these accounts and sending each notice individually was extremely time-consuming. And while it was helpful to have Levelset to ensure they always met the right deadlines, Ayla was eager to simplify the manual part of the process.
The solution
Ayla decided to work with her Levelset Account Manager, Erin Wallus, to automate their notice process. Erin’s role as an account manager is to evaluate Waste Connections’ use of Levelset and make suggestions to ensure they get the maximum value out of the features provided.
Erin knew that automation would make the notice process much faster and easier for Ayla and her team. However, the IT department at Waste Connections was still uncomfortable with opening up to API. The solution was to create a report that would pull the construction-related jobs into a spreadsheet, send that spreadsheet to Levelset, and then have those jobs entered into an automated queue so that notices would be sent on all of those jobs within the determined deadlines.
“We were leery of automation at first, but our solution to that was working with Erin and coming up with a solution that met our needs. We wanted to be able to have oversight into the customers that were receiving notices through automation, yet still get the benefit of enhanced turnaround time,” says Ayla.
“Working closely with Erin through this process was easy,” Ayla continued. “She turned around and got her team involved to come up with a solution that satisfied both our automation needs and our security needs, and it turned out to be a great time saver.”
The results
Ayla’s team now spends 90% less time per month on entering projects and creating notices for jobs across the 10 different states where they provide service.
“All they do now is run a report once a week and email it over. It’s very fast, and allows us to more broadly cover our projects without any extra data entry,” Ayla says.
“We’re now able to pull a report that shows all of our projects, weed out those we don’t want to send to (like projects that aren’t related to construction) and delete those. Then we email that spreadsheet to Levelset, and it automatically sends out those notices for us. That has enabled us to double the amount of projects in a fraction of the time.”
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