It seems that being on the cutting edge of innovative SaaS technology isn’t the only reason commercial contractors across the country are switching to BuildOps. According to Jared Anderson, General Manager at both Advanced Electrical & Advanced Mechanical Cos, LLC, communication and consistency are just as valuable when trying to function in the office—and on the job site.
Operating out of Pelham, Alabama, Advanced Electrical has been providing quality commercial and residential electrical services to the Birmingham area for over 35 years. With a headcount just shy of 20 employees, they’re looking to BuildOps to help scale their business, track work orders, and do away with the current industry standard of pen and paper.
A Look Into The Problem
Before their digital integration with the BuildOps platform, Jared Anderson, along with the rest of Advanced Electrical, faced a challenge familiar to most who work in the field of commercial contracting. “One of the biggest problems,” he told us, “was that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to create a spreadsheet for every job.” That means they weren’t able to get adequate costing information to the owner of each job on a day-to-day basis. “Then we just got too big to properly keep track of our work orders altogether.” Which were being tracked with individual folders hanging on the office wall. “Other software might have worked,” he admits. “But no one was willing to properly train my team, and we couldn’t get anybody to consistently answer our calls when trying to get set up.”
The manual nature of pen and paper, Anderson said, also made it difficult to deliver costing reports to the owner of the company—a problem that could have been alleviated by the proper field service management software. That being said, they were hard-pressed to find any organization that was willing to put in the time and effort to help identify their issues or provide any measure of guidance on how they could fix them.
“BuildOps stood out from the competition by helping us collect the information we needed to smoothly integrate the platform with our existing accounting software,” Anderson said. “And their ability to communicate, along with their willingness to make additional adjustments, made our decision even easier!”
A Life After BuildOps
After a smooth integration with our field service management tool, Advanced Electrical was able to streamline all of their previously manual processes. “Having an ever-evolving program which, at a minimum, accurately produces job-costing reports is a weight off our shoulders,” he told us. “And having someone to quickly and consistently respond to any of our questions or concerns is a great feeling too.”
It’s safe to say that, after switching over to BuildOps, Jared Anderson, and Advanced Electrical, were able to cut down on redundant administrative tasks and achieve the simplest results for day-to-day operations.
Our Shared Future With Advanced Electrical
Now that Jared and his team have established a workflow for their day-to-day business, we wondered what was next for him and his team of emerging commercial and residential contractors. “We do plan on growing,” he said. “But at this point, we want to focus on getting our HVAC company off the ground.” To that end, he hopes BuildOps will be able to help Advanced Electrical integrate the activity of their new HVAC company into one single account—which they’ll continue to use to track both services.
“I would tell anybody in the service industry that BuildOps is the way to go,” he said in closing. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to this business, and their willingness to make changes and remove barriers is exactly what most folks need!”