Rumco Construction came to HCSS looking for a new way to manage its projects.
For years, the highway and street construction company had relied on handwritten notes and text messages to generate daily cost reports. But Vice President Carlos Gonzalez said the numbers never quite added up.
“Between our superintendents, our project engineers and our accounting system, we were getting to where we had three different sets of books,” he said.
Gonzalez wanted to turn Rumco employees into users of data instead of just creators. The company also needed to eliminate the duplication of data, which had become a problem for project management.
Rumco implemented HCSS Heavy Job management software to combat these issues. Starting with a few pilot jobs, a small group of employees worked through the system to fully understand it before introducing it to all jobs across the company.
“We now have about 25 to 30 active jobs at once using HeavyJob,” said Gonzalez. “We have one guy using the field version on a laptop, but pretty much everyone else is using HeavyJob Mobile on iPads.”
The HeavyJob Mobile app has allowed foremen to work from the field and cut down on paperwork. HeavyJob sends reports of all jobs’ daily quantities, cumulative quantities and costs.
“They enjoy having the immediate feedback on how an activity stood, cost-wise,” said Gonzalez. “It has increased their awareness of their operations costs on a much more real-time basis. We even created a custom report which is set up on a batch process that goes out through a notification system to our managers.”
The report also highlights issues and exceptions, such as when a project manager reports a higher daily quantity than what was budgeted. This gives Rumco’s managers and superintendents a starting point to direct their attention toward and find problems.
“We can also monitor jobs that are tracking along well,” said Gonzalez. “You can quickly see at a glance that we’re on track.”
Rumco also uses HCSS’s estimating software, HeavyBid. Gonzalez said the combination allows Rumco to get better job cost information back into HeavyBid.
Rumco’s estimators are even using HeavyJob to compare their bids to the actual job totals.
“Since the structure is very similar in HCSS HeavyJob and HeavyBid, it’s easy for them to navigate and look at production,” said Gonzalez. “They can see what crews we actually used and be able to get quicker feedback on how their estimate performed to see how we’re actually doing. Then they can take some of that back to a future bid.”
