Celebrate ServiceChannel’s 25th anniversary with us through a blog series that pays tribute to our longest-serving employees. These narratives — from our most experienced voices — offer a personal look at how facilities management has grown and changed, and how ServiceChannel has been at the heart of it all.
Our Senior Database Administrator, Tomasz Piwowarski, has been with ServiceChannel for so long that it’s hard to imagine the company without him. For an impressive 22 years, Tomasz has had his finger on the pulse of facilities management while working on ServiceChannel’s most critical asset: our database. True passion complements the technical prowess that helped him thrive in a rapidly changing industry. After all, Tomasz still believes that the “magic is in the data.”
Reflecting on the Early Days
When Tomasz started working at ServiceChannel as an integrated database administrator, the facility management landscape looked nothing like it does today. Imagine spending hours sorting through piles of paperwork, then manually introducing every piece of information into the system with the incessant buzz of fax machines in the background. Even mobile phones were not that popular yet, so clients and service providers communicated via pagers. In Tomasz’s words, ServiceChannel was “a digital system working in an analog world.”
Early adopters like the Gap — still working with ServiceChannel today — recognized the value of a digital system to achieve more transparency, ease of access, and efficiency in managing work orders and invoices. Tomasz remembers how quickly even the most reluctant customers went from test-driving this new technology to eagerly wanting to edit and engage with their data. Over the years, several interactive features were added to the system, eventually leading to the ServiceChannel platform we know today.
Two Decades of Driving Digital Transformation
Throughout his career at ServiceChannel, Tomasz not only witnessed the digital revolution firsthand but also directly contributed to it. For instance, Tomasz played an integral role in the adoption of a process called Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which allowed customers to integrate their accounting system into the ServiceChannel platform. This technology reduced the time spent on manual invoice data entry from countless hours to mere minutes. Customers loved the new process, which was considerably faster and more accurate, leaving little room for errors. Previously skeptic service providers quickly got on board since the accelerated invoicing process meant they would get paid faster.
Technological advancements in the past two decades have also spurred attitude shifts, especially regarding sustainability. Apart from the obvious reduction in paper usage thanks to invoice automation, Tomasz mentions the ServiceChannel bundling feature that enables customers to see how many work orders are assigned to a specific location and group them. Service providers make fewer trips, significantly reducing resource consumption, and this is just one of the ways ServiceChannel helps brands become more eco-friendly.
Looking Forward to the Future
Our 25th anniversary has given us the opportunity to pause and look back on the wonderful journey that brought ServiceChannel where it is today and the people, like Tomasz, who have made it all possible. With visionaries like him on our team, we eagerly anticipate the future, inspired by the innovations unfolding today and those that will shape the next 25 years.