Our Business Growth and Investment Manager Rachel Ryder, recently caught up with SpyderTech, an Australian based company who have recently opened their first UK virtual office in Newcastle. SpyderTech provide property maintenance solutions to a range of sectors through their innovative work-flow management system.
- Firstly, a huge welcome to SpyderTech who have recently set up a virtual office and opened an office in Newcastle. What attracted you to the North East?
“Hi Rachel, and thank you for this opportunity to talk a little about SpyderTech. In answer to your question, we carried out some quite extensive due diligence looking at various other parts of the UK to ‘set up base’ and there was nowhere that had quite the same feel as the North East of England. We all felt that it was a vibrant place very much ‘on the up’ with a great focus on the tech industry which is obviously very important to us and being an expat. I love the excitement I can see throughout the region that has been generated by the investment into the Toon! Even though I originate from ‘down south’(but have family in the region) I’ve always had a soft spot for the Magpies!”
- Can you tell us more about SpyderTech and the services you provide?
“Absolutely! Spydertech is a privately owned organisation based in New South Wales on the east coast of Australia about an hour north of Sydney. Incidentally, the owners of the group live in Newcastle in NSW so always makes me smile when I go there and drive around Jesmond, Wallsend etc in Australia!! We are part of a larger group of companies and came about as a direct spin off of the social housing maintenance dept. That organisation has been providing all types of property maintenance to government and not for profit companies for around 25 years and early on in their journey they created their own work-flow management system that efficiently processed the high volume of work orders received every day. Fast forward to a couple of years ago and the owners of the business decided to design a version of this platform that would be commercially available. There’s a real focus on the user experience with SpyderFlow, which is the product name, to ensure that everyone is able to navigate their way round the platform and effectively use the system. There’s so much more functionality to the product other than the Workflow management but that can wait for another time hopefully”.
- Thanks for sharing the company journey with us. Can you tell us about some projects that you’ve been involved with in Australia?
“Certainly, as I mentioned earlier, the product that SpyderFlow is based on was created exclusively for the social housing industry in Australia and has been used to manage large scale maintenance contracts and smaller projects throught the nation with almost all of the state governments. From memory we have, at various times used the product to run long term contracts with the state governments of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and ran projects such as our Property Assessments Surveys (PAS) in Queensland, Northen Territories and ACT. With the PAS we physically inspect the assets of the organisations to get a snap shot in time of the condition of each home and from this our clients manage their planned maintenance programs and budgets, I believe they are called property condition audits or something similar in UK. We can also use this to help measure the carbon footprint of a building which would then be used to create action plans to reduce that. Over the last couple of years we have been diversifying a little and have been using the system within a few other industries such as aged care, schools infrastructure, shop fitting. All in all it’s a very comprehensive, flexible, user friendly system that can save both time and money. “
- We know that SpyderTech create ‘Innovation That Matters’ can you tell us more about the innovation behind your product and how that innovation can help businesses in the North East and wider UK?
“Yes, so innovation that sits behind the SpyderTech suite of products is derived from a long history of being on ‘the other side’ of the fence. We have sat in the seats of companies trying to raise and complete hundreds if not thousands of work-orders every day with everybody wanting priority! We feel that SpyderFlow will enable users to achieve this comfortably without sacrificing anything and providing even the toughest of reporting regimes.
From the look and feel of the product you’ll see we have been placing an equal emphasis on the user experience as the overall output, for example, the in-built ‘gamification’ of the product subconsciously reinforces what specific part of the product the user is in with thought or prompting. For the technical amongst us they will be reassured it is GDPR compliant, it is built upon the most modern cloud-based technologies provided by the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
To get a real feel for the technology we’re always happy to arrange a demo and show you just what SpyderFlow can do!”
- What sectors are you looking to work with in the UK?
“Great question, as I have mentioned, Spyderflow is based on a platform almost exclusively utilised within the social housing industry and performed very well within that but SpyderFlow has deliberately been designed to be very flexible and we feel can be used across a number of different sectors. We are confident that any organisation looking to manage any work flows around their asset, SpyderFlow would prove to be an invaluable tool. I will be in UK in October and November this year and am planning to engage with as many organisations within the social housing sector, aged care sector, schools, councils, renewables, tourism, churches and literally any industry with multiple assets”.
- Thanks for your time Michael, we really appreciate it! We have one final question. After visiting the North East on a number of occasions, and having a virtual office in Newcastle, we’d love to know why the area is such a great place to work?
“Not an easy question as there’s so many to choose from! For me, something that really sets the region apart is the genuine warmth of the people, in my previous role when I lived in UK I often visited the area and always looked forward to meeting new friends and old, genuinely the nicest people you could wish to meet. On my last trip over from Oz I managed to get to Bamburgh castle and had some ‘refreshments’ in the Bamburgh Castle Inn, the carvery was unbelievably delicious.”
SpyderTech will be visiting the UK in October & November and are keen to meet with businesses and introduce them to ‘SpyderFlow’ – find out how the team can make it their mission to support you in managing your property portfolio: www.spydertech.net.au
