Profile at a Glance: Established in 1998, W.E. Pour Walls is one of three concrete products companies owned by Troy Emerson in Minneapolis, MN. The company specializes in pouring walls and foundations for residential new construction. The other two companies are involved in waterproofing and flat work.
The Problem: Keeping up with change orders and the many details associated with having several crews out in the field was too complicated for a system relying on hand-written notes and verbal orders. Billing, in particular, became problematic as contractors and company representatives remembered job details differently.
“To survive in construction nowadays,” explains Emerson, “you have to make sure you have everything billed out correctly and all of your notes are in order when the guys show up to the job. Dealing with changes, especially, makes it difficult to compete if you don’t have a good system.”
The Moraware Solution: JobTracker made it easy to schedule work crews for the three companies on a daily basis. The company also found the ability to attach critical documents to the job very helpful.
“The reason we like it is it helps us with job scheduling,” Emerson says. “We also can attach all of our miscellaneous things to one job, so if someone has a question I can go right to that job and pull up my plans, my surveys, my bid, job notes and it also helps me with my billings.”
“It helps my guys out in the field too. If we ever have a job change we can attach it to that file, which is huge. So if something ever comes down where somebody says they didn’t sign a change order or something, we have everything attached to that job.”
“Our server allows us to do change orders out in the field, so we can do printouts, get them signed and then those documents come back into our office and get scanned in and saved. That is big.”
“When I make a job a certain color in JobTracker, the guy in the office can see that it is ready to be billed. After he bills it, he makes it a different color so I know it has been billed. It is a good check and balance system.”
“We compete against guys that don’t have an electronic system and have harder problems. We try to sell it as a tool to the builders and a lot of them see it and they like it. We are able to get a little higher price than the next guy because they see how organized we are.”
“We also use it for service calls. I write down what happened, so at the end of the year I can print out all my service calls and see what we can do to avoid having them next year.”
“I couldn’t go back to what we were doing before. The scheduling is so easy.”
