10 Feet of Magnets Became One Screen: How WJ O'Neil runs dispatch, maintenance, and billing on BuildOps
With BuildOps, WJ O’Neil moved from scattered information to a connected view of their business.
Bob McQueen doesn't want service at W.J. O'Neil Company to be the biggest mechanical contractor in Michigan; he wants it to be the best. The company has always stood behind its work, never taken shortcuts, and grown because customers kept coming back.
What they didn't have was a system that matched that standard.
Company: W.J. O'Neil Company
Industry: Commercial mechanical, HVAC service & construction
Location: Livonia, MI
Serves: Industrial plants to retail complexes — service and retro-fits across 82 techs
The challenge
W.J. O'Neil Company built 40 years of reputation on never letting a job fall through the cracks. But their dispatch system, a giant whiteboard crammed with slips of paper and magnets, was literally falling off the wall.
“Job slips got folded up, tucked in a magnet, put on a 10-foot-by-6-foot whiteboard. On the board was a column for each service guy, so all of his jobs were under his name,” said McQueen, Service Manager at W.J. O'Neil.
The board worked only if someone was standing in front of it. For everyone else, the work was out of sight.
“You couldn’t work anywhere else,’ McQueen said.
Tracking equipment was just as difficult. Their previous system allowed only one piece of equipment per job, even though technicians regularly serviced multiple units on a single visit.
“We rarely went out to work on just one piece of equipment, so basically nothing ever got assigned to a job. We had no easily accessible history,” McQueen said.
Maintenance documentation lived in separate Excel files. Reports had to be created and distributed manually, and billing often stalled while the office tracked down missing information.
The company also needed visibility into T&M revenue, PM revenue, total revenue, gross margin, and billable versus nonbillable hours. The previous systems hadn’t delivered it.
“That was one of the owner’s big beefs about a lot of software in the past. These people can’t give me a dang report that’ll show me anything. How do you run a business when you don’t know what’s going on?” McQueen said.
The solution
WJ O’Neil chose BuildOps to connect dispatch, equipment records, maintenance, reporting, and billing in one system.
For McQueen, the key moment was seeing maintenance forms attached directly to equipment records. Technicians could complete them from the mobile app while they were still in the field.
“Every piece of equipment on every maintenance has a form attached to it. When the guys are out in the field doing a PM, he opens the form right in his app and fills it out. That was one of the big selling points to me,” McQueen said.
Now, instead of calling the office or searching through separate files, technicians have everything they need on their phones.
“Technicians can click on a property and see the history of that property, right on their phone,” McQueen said.
The results
WJ O’Neil moved from scattered information to a connected view of the work:
McQueen no longer has to build and distribute the same reports over and over.
“I used to have to run reports daily, weekly, monthly and send them to this person, send them to that person. And now, I create it once, set up the export and everybody gets what they need,” McQueen said.
He can also build new reports without paying for custom work whenever the business needs a different view.
“Anytime we needed a ‘Hey, this would be a cool report,’ we had to call somebody and pay them to create these reports. And then BuildOps, I just go in and start playing with it. We’ve created so many reports, we’ve gotten hundreds of reports,” McQueen said.
For Julie Bruce, Service Office Manager at W.J. O’Neil Company, the change is most visible in the time saved reviewing information.
“We were printing a lot of stuff. It was so tedious to look at all of that information,” Bruce said. “Now we can run reports, and you can see everything in one glance.”
That complete documentation also helps billing move forward.
“We’re assured that everything is there, and we can go right ahead and issue those invoices,” McQueen said. “We don’t have to go back, call the technician, verify something. It’s all clear.”
For W.J. O’Neil Company, the result is more than replacing a whiteboard. Information now moves with the work, from dispatch to the field, from maintenance to billing, and from daily operations to the owner’s desk.
“It enables us to be much more efficient with our time and our scheduling and our billing. It’s helped out tremendously,” McQueen said.
