Why Electrical Contractors need better Workforce Management

In any business, people are most important asset. At RIVET, we have an incredible team building a construction tech company. In Detroit, we’re working right alongside electrical contractors that helps shape the feature set of our platform.

Our electrical contractor customers value their people the same. In the back office, the teams that manage field crews are critical to accurately estimating budgets and timelines that can make or break a company’s reputation. They tell us, getting the right people with the right qualifications to job sites is a massive undertaking that’s only become more burdened by a declining skilled workforce. Additionally, finding qualified and available workers is the number one indicator of success or failure.

Because, we believe Digital Labor Operations enables your best people to work on the business, instead of in the business. Specifically, your back office operators — field managers, project managers, estimators, schedulers, safety and HR teams — need a reliable workforce system of record integrated with your current tech stack that streamlines labor bid planning, forecasting, scheduling and field communication.

First, estimating teams rely on project managers and schedulers for accurate workforce projections and current labor utilization. With the right software, you can have a more accurate depiction of labor needs and when to add more jobs for business growth. From there, you can shift from scheduling week to week, to forecasting monthly or yearly. You can’t easily do this without software, and that puts your business growth at risk.

Second, your book of workers is as critical as your book of business. To stay competitive, you need a workforce management system where you can access profiles instantly. For example, you get immediate access to the right certifications, safety trainings, availability and locations of your workforce. Next, you systematically shuffle and reassign hundreds of workers across various states, union locals or job sites. Then, you can push automated messages for all of those changes. At RIVET, we’ve built features for transferring and dispatch that look and feel like your existing workflows, only better and easier to execute.

Third, labor planning and labor management are essential to balancing customer demand, profitability, new bids and worker satisfaction. With a workforce system of record, you can show customers a repository of qualified and available workers for bid requests. With confidence, you can schedule crews and project timelines. Automatically, your scheduling actions are tracked while you work, and assignment history is logged in worker profiles. As a result, your workers benefit too, with quick access to schedules and changes.

Finally, inaccurate bids lead to cost overages and labor shortages. With labor averaging 50% of a project budget, the risk for overspend is high. With the RIVET platform, monitoring labor utilization and Work in Progress is simple. You can foresee overtime, backfill absences, transfer workers between jobs and monitor your blended labor rate in real time. Imagine saving just one labor hour per worker per month. If you have 100 workers at a rate of $70/hour, that’s $84,000 in savings annually.

Fortunately, moving to Digital Labor Ops truly isn’t hard.  Gaining popularity among contractors, the RIVET platform is a powerful labor operations software with built-in forecasting, scheduling and field communication. Using RIVET, you can build schedules from a digital Roster Board, on a Gantt or directly on a live Map. As a result, RIVET customers are reporting more accurate labor plans, reduced margin fade, better work-life balance, and more time to grow their businesses.

At RIVET, our goal is to support all electrical contractors in the U.S. with Digital Labor Ops that encourages prosperity in the construction community.

Finally, we welcome all electrical contractors to check out our platform, over a call or by watching our RIVET CEO Ryan Meitl’s personal video tour here.