Festimed

David Rock, CEO and Co-Founder of Festimed, oversees event medical provisions for numerous festivals and events throughout the UK and Ireland with event capacities from 500 to 80,000 people.

With so many moving pieces, he’s consistently looking for new ways to improve efficiencies at his organization. That’s one of the reasons he built RockIT, a branded Knack app, to automate and improve the operational output of essential business functions. 

From recruitment and training to finance, safety, and fleet management, he leverages Knack to streamline workflows across his entire company from “a one stop shop.” To learn more, we met with David to see how he built RockIT and to hear about its business impacts.

Streamlining Recruitment With Knack

David first used Knack to construct a standardized hiring process with RockIT. Before Knack, they leveraged Google forms and Jotforms to manage recruitment, but this process required manual work and a bigger recruitment department to manage. 

With RockIT, most of the process is automated which cuts down on time to hire. The Festimed hiring process consists of four to five stages, and they’re all managed from the app. 

For example, required information must be completed before candidates can be moved on to the next stage in the process, and if there’s missing information, the application will be sent back to attain it. 

Interviews can be automatically scheduled from the Knack app and interviewers can easily add Zoom or Teams links. If a candidate is accepted, the background check is also automatically triggered.

If all goes well with the background check, the app automates the reference checking process and sends reminders to ensure references are completed in a timely manner. Updates to the hiring process can even be made from mobile devices.

As a result, David’s created a more efficient and less costly process for managing recruitment. After moving his recruitment process to Knack, he decreased the size of the recruitment team from seven people to one person.

RockIT is what we branded the Knack platform and it runs our company for us. It’s fully integrated from recruitment all the way to training and documentation, investigations, fleet management and equipment management. It does everything.

Maintaining Health and Safety Compliance

With RockIT, David can track annual health and safety inspections and see when they’re due. From the app, he tracks fire inspections, contractor inspections, emergency lighting, and other health and safety needs.

By seeing key health and safety measures labeled as red, yellow, or green, he can quickly observe what things are in good or bad statuses and if he needs to take action to maintain compliance.

Before Knack, this information was recorded in a paper book. By switching to Knack, they reduced environmental impacts by digitizing and improved compliance by having health and safety information stored in an accessible, centralized location.

Furthermore, the app has helped them achieve high ratings on inspections, and their inspector even suggested that they should consider rolling out the application to other hospitals to help them improve efficiency and compliance.

Saving Time on Finances With Knack 

David has also saved time and reduced costs associated with financial approvals through Knack. From RockIT, clients can login to a dedicated portal and see the costs and value delivered by Festimed.

Also, when one of his staff members creates a purchase order on Knack, it’s automatically sent to him or a director for approval. In addition, RockIT is integrated with Xero, so he can access financial reports from either platform. 

By streamlining the process, he cut down on manual entry and the need to hire more accountants, which has led to crucial time savings. Furthermore, he’s delivered a better client experience by constructing a dedicated portal for them to review expenses.

We’ve tried some of the expense apps that are out there, and we always come back to Knack. It’s reliable.

Automating Fleet and Equipment Management

From a centralized location in RockIT, David can manage his entire fleet of ambulances and equipment. He’s built a dashboard of all their ambulances where he can track insurance, inspections, and maintenance needs.

He can drill down into each vehicle and see the specific logs and data on that vehicle. When that vehicle needs repairs, he can print out a repair form from Knack and give it to a mechanic. After a mechanic completes repairs, that form is uploaded back into Knack.

The app also conducts predictive maintenance and flags vehicles that are needed for tire changes or other maintenance based on usage and time. He can also see whether vehicles are marked as red, yellow, or green based on the condition of the vehicle. 

When his staff needs to check out a vehicle, they only have access to ambulances that are road-ready, which prevents errors from selecting a vehicle that’s out of service.

Before Knack, this process was tracked in a paper binder. Thus, by building a digital solution with Knack, he’s been able to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact. 

One of our KPIs is the environmental impacts we have, and the reduction of paper and energy has been reduced as a result of Knack.

Giving More Power to End Users With No-Code

When asked to summarize the value of Knack, David stated that its greatest strength is the ability to allow someone without coding experience, but that has key business context, to quickly build powerful database systems. 

For instance, he used Knack to build a robust platform for quickly booking and processing COVID samples. That system processed thousands of tests per day while it was active.

David is a great example of why we love democratizing development with no-code. When someone with David’s expertise is given the ability to build powerful platforms with Knack, wonderful things happen.

The ability to easily customize Knack is the big thing. The reason the platform is so good to me is that as a non-IT, non-coder, I can fully understand the restrictions of a digital database system. Being the end user, it allows me to build things that developers wouldn’t. Those things don’t come into a developer’s head because they’re not experiencing the issues like I am.