Duro Electric’s last Workforce Management platform kept failing, then they upgraded to RIVET
“It’s been completely 100% better.”
Bill Rome
Field Operations Manager
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Adopting the RIVET Workforce Management Platform can have a huge impact on your field productivity and profitability.
The Duro Electric team’s insights for other contractors
- “I’d tell other contractors RIVET is going to help them with not only their Productivity, but also their culture keeping, especially if they’re a large organization. – Mark Stark, Duro President
“I’d tell other contractors to throw their whiteboard out, they’re living in the dark ages and to step into the future.” – Bill Rome, Duro Field Operations Manager
Duro Electric Company started in a barn 45 years ago. Between then and 2016, Duro – a combination of founder Duane Ron’s first and last names – had mostly been a smaller electrical contractor with just over 80 workers in the field.
The company has picked up a number of awards from the Association of Builders and Contractors along the way, including accolades for National Excellence in Construction.
After becoming a part of Everus Construction Group in 2016, Duro’s staff more than doubled, expanding to 197. Faced with that kind of growth, Duro’s previous Workforce Management platform couldn’t keep up.
So Duro adopted RIVET.
“It’s been completely 100 percent better,” said Operations Manager Bill Rome. Rome has been with Duro for over 21 years, starting as an apprentice when the company was still privately held with around 50 employees. Today he oversees all of the company’s labor and is the primary RIVET user at Duro.
“It’s been a good platform and it doesn’t give me heartache,” he said.
Watch the Duro team video interview here:
Transforming Workforce Management
With RIVET, Rome can easily transfer field workers from job to job, as labor needs arise – something he couldn’t do with his previous platform.
“Moving to RIVET really changed how effective we could be at getting our jobs done. I wasn’t constantly on tech support saying, ‘Hey, this is wrong,’” he said. “Even if the rest of my day goes to shit, [RIVET] seems to be at least one piece that works for me and doesn’t break.”
Rome estimates RIVET saves him at least 10-20 hours a week. If he’s at a job site and gets a phone call about staffing, he can open his iPad and check who’s where in an instant.
“It’s right there and ready to go,” he said. “Nobody likes digging for stuff.”
This, in turn, feeds into Duro’s culture. Just glancing through the Roster and knowing who’s actually working where and when before you arrive at a job site empowers you to make connections with your people and see them as more than just names on a spreadsheet.
“Having that at my fingertips is really important,” Duro president Mark Stark said.
Every time someone at Duro opens a browser window, three tabs open: Duro’s private cloud, its accounting system and RIVET.
“If they wanna Google ‘ice cream shops down the street,’ they’re gonna have to tab past RIVET,” he said. “It’s important to always have that in their face.”
Stark started his professional life as an electrical engineer in Kansas City before joining Capital Electric as a project manager. He’s been with Duro since 2016, starting as vice president of operations before his promotion to company president. Stark’s needs from a WFM platform are a little different from Rome’s. In his role, the real-time visibility of who’s on what job is invaluable.
“We have to care about our people,” he said. “It all translates not only to caring about the people, but also caring about the business.” Meaning, if someone is struggling with a personal issue, his instinct isn’t to fire them and say they aren’t worth working at Duro anymore.
“We have to shore up and team around them to help them through a rough time so they can get back in the swing of things again,” Stark said. “Most of the time, that pays us back in a lot of ways.”
The Duro Team’s favorite RIVET Platform features:
Tagging: “We had our guys in two different schools. In IEC or in CITC, we know which schools they were going to, whether they’re BAT certified or not.” – Bill Rome
Certification tracking: “I like that we can actually upload the PDF into there, or even a JPEG and say that’s stuck to that guy’s file. We know when it expires if it does.” – Bill Rome
The Business Impact
Duro Electric’s Workforce Management journey started six years ago. The results were basic, but the company’s previous platform gave Stark and Rome a path forward. Workers were tagged by experience level and assigned to jobs. As the team got more comfortable, Duro began trying more sophisticated workflows. Then that platform buckled under the weight of Duro’s demands.
“That was tough, because that shakes you at your foundation,” Stark said. The previous platform was unreliable. Duro trusted the system and saw WFM’s potential, and adjusted its culture to rely on the previous tool. With that trust broken, Stark and Rome needed to find a replacement for this mission-critical tool. Fast.
Changing from one platform to another isn’t easy. Especially mid-flight. Everything looks and feels a little different. What exists in one place in one tool is somewhere completely different in the next. When your company is primed for tech adoption though, the transitions are less onerous.
“If you already have that culture of ‘this is what we need out of the system, this is what we want,’ the change is easier,” Stark said. “[RIVET] was already working in a direction we wanted to go in.”
Scenes from the Prefabrication shop at Duro Electric in Englewood, Colorado:
Working with software companies is nothing new for Stark. First it was CAD vendors in 1985, desktop publishing software came soon after. He recalled how previous vendors would fulfill their contractually obligated training hours and then disappear once the quota was met. If any further questions arose, Stark and his team had to figure out answers on their own.
“RIVET is way different than that,” Stark said. “You truly are our partners. You truly care about what we’re doing and what you need to do to support us.”
Stark stressed how important that relationship is to Duro. The on-site onboarding we offer is just the start.
Given how complex and customizable RIVET is, it’s imperative that Stark can pick up the phone and talk to someone who’s familiar with his business and the way he uses the platform. That way, when he’s got a question he can quickly get an answer that’s actually helpful.
“That matters to me,” Stark said. “You actually have conversations with us.”
Rome agreed.
“That’s why we chose to make that jump,” he said. “Anytime I’ve had a question, I call or send an email. I get good response times and [Customer Success] lets me know what I can do or how they can help me.”
While RIVET integrates with leading ERP and accounting systems, doing so isn’t mandatory. Rome said that even before Duro’s integration, adopting RIVET was valuable thanks to the amount of Controlled Transparency it brought to the company. Duro grants access permissions to certain data and areas of the tool based on role.
“Being able to customize [access] specific to our needs is fantastic,” Rome said.
Given the sheer number of roles and pay-rates Duro has, integrating has given Rome the confidence that his composite labor rate is accurate. This makes it easier when he needs to move manpower around to stay on budget.
“That’s gonna save me a ton of time right there,” Rome said. “Can this job afford a little bit higher level guy, or do we need to find some of our key younger guys because we need the help, but are still good performers, at a lower rate?”
Rome said that once the integration is in place, it’s easy to see how a project is tracking financially too.
“It really helps because now we’re seeing how the job is performing” in real-time, he said. With that data in hand, Duro now has the power to make changes to project staffing and ensure the job comes in at or under budget. Something that simply isn’t possible with a spreadsheet or magnet-filled whiteboard.
“You can do better,” Stark said.
He knows this because he’s been there, having spent countless Friday nights moving magnetic name tags around and updating spreadsheets. Duro still uses the latter for a few ancillary tasks, but the difference now is that spreadsheets aren’t the main way the company manages its workforce.
“The spreadsheet becomes a supplement instead of a tool we rely on,” Stark said. “I’m gonna call [a spreadsheet] a crutch to get us to a position where we can throw it away altogether and just rely 100 percent on RIVET.”
To see how RIVET can transform your self-performing contractor business, schedule a demo today.
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