How CarolinaPower Strategically Expands into Hyperscale Opportunities While Strengthening Its Core Customer Relationships

Travis, David — thank you for joining for this fireside chat. To start, tell me a little about your background and roles, Carolina Power and PPC, and the company.

I've been with Carolina Power for 20 years. Started as an APM, worked my way up to project manager, branch manager, now senior vice president overseeing the whole Carolina Power division of PPC Partners. Carolina Power is one of five companies within PPC Partners. We range all the way from Wisconsin to Florida.

David Szymakowski, director of operations for the Wisconsin Automation Group. I started almost six years ago, hired as an engineering manager, and six months later was promoted to branch manager, now director of operations. Automation — our base is in Wisconsin, but we also go down into the Carolinas, and we have an office in Atlanta. Primarily half and half engineering and field people. We do industrial factory automation, design, a panel shop that builds control panels, and a machine-safety group that does risk assessments, mitigation, and validation — we're one of the leading companies doing that right now.

A lot is going on in the industry — the era of hyperscaler projects, a labor shortage in electrical I've never seen in my lifetime. Is it impacting your business? In the South we're not going after the hyperscale data centers, because being a merit shop and the amount of manpower they pull, we've been selective. They'll pull 200-plus electricians — they could pull multiple locations, your whole staff. We have market share, we have customers. If we pull our resources to go do these hyperscale data centers, and when those data centers leave, we're going to be back-filled. We don't want to lose that. But we also want to take advantage. So we utilize our traveling industrial group to do the data centers and partner with our local group. It's all about project selection — one reason the RIVET tool is helpful. In that prospective-projects view, we enter a big project and say, okay, what's the manpower pool going to be, what backlog do we have, what commitment do we have. That helps us with project selection.

When you take on jobs that can consume your entire workforce, what happens to your core customer base? That's the fear across the industry. If we make ourselves into a data center contractor, our customers move on — they still need someone to wire their buildings, and someone else fills that need. So we balance it. We're diversified north and south, and diversified in markets, so if one group's spending goes down, we have something to fall back on. But there's high margin in the data centers, so I want us to do data centers. Up north they're very welcoming — we've completed some hyperscalers, with more in the queue, and we're leveraging prefabrication and modularization to get even more into it strategically.

We just finished a large one — at peak it was 600 electricians — and we were able to do it without the effect everyone's concerned about. We had a pretty good plan at it. Up north we're union, so we used our union resources to pull together the workforce. It was the largest single project the group has ever taken on, and we did it successfully, on time, safely, with no hang-ups. Now we can share our findings with the South.

Was RIVET one of the reasons you chose to work with us? At first it was the manpower scheduling. We looked for years trying to find software that would schedule out manpower — everything was more service-industry dispatch. Everybody used spreadsheets, or Smartsheet. I got a random call I almost didn't answer, standing by the coffee pot. He was talking about RIVET and manpower scheduling. I said okay, set up a call. When I saw the manpower scheduling component I was like, this is my spreadsheet on steroids. Then the mapping view, to see where your people are located — because we're a people business, we really care about our people. As we've grown I don't even recognize names or faces, but we can look on the map and say, this guy lives on this side of the city, is there a way to get him on a project on that side. Then the forecasting piece was really a selling point — we had another spreadsheet just for forecasting, separate from our manpower spreadsheet. This took our two spreadsheets and did way more. Add the communication piece on top of that.

We had an in-built tool in my division for workforce planning, and it broke at some point. We tried others — started with Smartsheet, moved to Monday.com, which wasn't a right fit. Meanwhile PPC started looking into RIVET. We jumped in, and everybody was nervous — we'd switched three times in one year. But we were up and running in two weeks. We had names entered, jobs imported, our workforce scheduled for the three months out. It had immediate impact. For the engineering side — those are salaried people, I need to keep them billable. Every morning I open the dashboard and look for that one hour: is the chart above the line, do we have for the next four weeks forecasted work for the team. I use it in a different way than other organizations, but it works — it tells me to tell the PM team to go find something because the forecast is falling.

How has it helped operating in many states? We haven't fully deployed throughout the Southeast yet, and we're very close. But in the Carolinas — offices in Greenville, Columbia, Charleston, North Augusta, all within an hour and a half of each other — there are projects in between. Having the visibility to say you've got a guy in one branch who can come work on another project, we've really been sharing resources. For automation, the resource managers across offices can all get on a call together, pull up RIVET, and see in seconds where they have somebody available to shift onto another project. That's been a game changer — before, it would be a manager talking to a bunch of people.

What's it been like working with our team? Pretty tremendous. I believe we were the first ones trying to use the tool the way we were, and nobody ever said this isn't what RIVET is. There was always listening to understand what we're trying to accomplish — will the tool work, or does RIVET need to make a tweak. Very cooperative, always the right people on the call. As executive sponsor, it's something I'm passionate about. We set up an internal core team that David leads. The team has been very open, not pushy. Some software companies are pushy — all about a sale. That doesn't seem to be the way here. You can tell they care, and that goes back to your culture. We're a people business; we do business with people.

What's the biggest impact so far? Right now it's project selection — because we haven't done the full rollout, that's a bigger ship to steer. You can enter the prospective job in two minutes and see graphically whether it fits. My team knows, and we look at the forecast on large projects like that even though we haven't rolled it out. That's been super helpful.