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Construction Project Management App

Challenge

AddAline Asphalt Maintenance offers asphalt and parking lot repair services to commercial and industrial property owners and managers. These services include asphalt repairs, small paving, catch basin repairs and replacements, concrete curbs, line painting and crack filling. AddAline required a simple process for gathering and organizing information to prepare quotations. Their main challenges centered around geographic and process driven limitations. AddAline services a very large territory in Southern Ontario. Along with this very large territory, AddAline does the majority of their work in remote locations. Moreover, the AddAline quoting process is photo-driven. This means that estimators needed to capture photographs of potential jobs and remotely send them to receive comprehensive project quotes. Quoting was extremely complex as some customers had multiple location or multiple elements that needed attention. The quoting process needed to be revamped to improve the sales and estimating process, consistency and the quote response time.

Objectives

Ultimately, AddAline wanted to improve their customer experience and increase profitability. By streamlining their site survey and production communication process, AddAline would get quotes out faster, improve their customer engagement, have higher quality communication and help bolster their brand image. They knew that any process for quoting would have to move forward with mobility and ease of use as a primary focus.

By allowing their customers a self-serve approach for approvals and allowing them to dictate the priority and order that work is completed, AddAline could provide customers more transparency regarding both completed work and work during the project process.

Reduction of manual form entry and the timely process of estimating, along with improving their site efficiency, would have a significant impact to the bottom line. By ensuring that all tools and materials were accounted for and were available onsite, AddAline could reduce errors and warranty recalls. The system would also need to be adequately future-proofed as the investment would need to have significant ROI to be considered successful.

Results

The enhanced Project Estimating and Management System built by CoreSolutions allowed the sales and estimating team to deliver high quality estimates to their customers in a fraction of the time of the previous partially automated system. The system allowed AddAline to deliver an electronic quote to clients while on site for immediate approval. Automating their calculations through the quoting tool made estimating even faster. Through an upgraded user interface for clients and staff, individuals gained the ability to log into a portal and select and approve work to be completed.

New scheduling functionality created more transparency between the service workers, client, and management; this ensured that work was completed in an organized fashion and that crews had the equipment required to complete the work and are accountable for their time and materials. Finally, work that has been completed is verified back to the client to ensure that nothing slipped between the cracks. Pun intended.

The Project Estimating and Management System made the process of scheduling jobs much easier. A scheduling page was created that allowed managers to simply assign crews their upcoming jobs with just a few clicks. A weather widget was even included that allowed managers and estimators to strategically plan work and site surveys around whatever mother nature was throwing at them.

This system allowed for cost savings in terms of sales team deployment. Before the system, AddAline needed to deploy four inspectors. After the system, only two were needed. Also, the new Android-based mobile app overhauled the crew leader processes. The app now displays immediate tasks for crew leaders as they arrive on a site and allows crew to get immediate feedback to any questions that may arise. The Project Estimating and Management System helps AddAline keep track of equipment and safety procedures. Also, with the intent to future-proof the system, it was built using native PHP. This allows for future growth and a simplified modification process.

In terms of a return on investment, AddAline had performance ratio calculations developed that show management how well their crew leaders are performing based on personalized key performance indicators. The potential to leverage the new system as a source of revenue from other similar companies is a great opportunity as well.