What we learned: Construction Productivity Workshop

Alison:

This event was really special for me, because RIVET as a brand is all about strong connections. We make those connections with our software but also by being on the road with the self-perform contractor community. We brought together a think tank not just of east coast and New England contractors, but other software providers too.

Kojo brought insights on how tariffs will affect materials, while Milwaukee shared really cool details about the geofencing features of its connected tools. Trimble showed the power of its ERP software and how, when connected to the RIVET Workforce Management platform, it creates a real-time labor utilization sync for every Labor Planned project.

As usual, I learned the most from contractors. Every contractor in the room agreed that labor is the largest risk on projects, and that planning and managing it is difficult.

Ernie P. Menold, vice president of Philly sheet metal contractor Ernest D. Menold Inc., described how he previously managed his field workforce with spreadsheets. He could only see a one-week lookahead and emailed it out 3x a week as changes were made. He wanted to alleviate his superintendent’s time.

After adopting RIVET and syncing field employee data from his Trimble Spectrum account, seeing employee certs and their expiration dates – along with planned absences and labor burn rate – on his jobs in real-time was easy. His superintendent can now send pre-populated dispatch messages to the field in minutes instead of the constant phone tree that used to suck up so much time, too. Ernie shared his company’s Workforce Management profile with us here.

Steven Drouin, Senior VP of Technology from Interstate Electrical Services, shared powerful knowledge on how he executes labor planning at Interstate. He was tasked with automating the company’s software stack and getting the systems talking to one another.

As a result, 14 years ago he implemented Spectrum. Hearing that the platform has been reliable for him that many years later is amazing. Later he added Traxperra – another Trimble product – for payroll. With it, all payroll data entered from the field syncs with Spectrum. After being dissatisfied with his previous Workforce Management platform, he switched to RIVET. Steven’s team was hesitant to try Workforce Management again after that experience. Only 15% of the team utilized the previous tool.

He eventually integrated RIVET with Spectrum, where his work-in-progress data is pushed into RIVET and displayed on his project Labor Plans. This lets him see labor estimates vs. actuals in real-time across all his projects. Steven now takes his pre-construction projects and marries those with his active projects into a company-wide Labor Demand chart where he can see his total workforce capacity.

With 800 employees across eight locations in six states, there’s a strong incentive to keep them all active. Forecasting pursuit projects in RIVET helps with that.

“People are hired for a lifetime,” Steven said. “RIVET helps us fill in that gap. Our pre-construction team knows exactly where they need to target work, what type of work and in what areas. We can fill gaps and make sure people are working more efficiently.”

Steven shared his company’s Workforce Management profile with us here.

In the spirit of a “workshop,” we brought a useful worksheet for contractors wondering if improving labor planning and workforce management is right for their business.

That worksheet can be accessed here for anyone who’d like to start thinking about it, and we hope they reach out!

Austin: The one key take away for me was that east coast contractors are very eager to talk Productivity and solutions to their needs. The contractors all seem to be using traditional methods to manage their labor – spreadsheets and magnet boards were a hot-button topic. Certifications also came up quite a few times. Contractor health and safety teams could benefit a ton from collaborating with scheduling side of things to keep track of who has the right qualifications to be on a job.

Devin: With the information that ERPs like Trimble’s Vista, Viewpoint and Spectrum provide, contractors are becoming interested in comparing that data to their labor planning. Testimonials from Steven and Ernie prove that having a Labor Plan for every project and using WIP to refine it along the way will make your projects more profitable.