From 300 Workers to 850 — and Turning Down Hyperscale Bids on Purpose.

Brian, thanks for sitting down. You've been involved with RIVET pretty much since the beginning — your team went through all the processes of reviewing it, then implementing and rolling it out carefully. Let's talk about ERMCO first. You're one of the largest specialty contractors in Indiana. Give me a little background.

The company was started in 1962, so we've been rolling for quite a while. We were owned by five siblings before we became an ESOP about nine years ago. I've worked with the company 27 years, started as an apprentice, and had multiple jobs throughout. Right now I'm the director of innovation development — I oversee a lot of our operations and construction technology, which includes RIVET, and our purchasing department.

ERMCO has seen a lot of growth. Fifteen years ago we had 300 people in the field; we're roughly 850 today. It's grown immensely, and with the hyperscale work coming, we're going to grow even more. What's made the company successful? All of the above — being an ESOP and the culture that goes with it, the communication, not having silos because what's good for one is good for all. We've got great field leaders and great executive leaders.

There's a lot of pressure on the labor market with everything going on in construction — the hyperscalers and data centers. Are you seeing impacts on your ability to staff projects? We utilize RIVET from the pre-construction process, looking at prospective projects, and we're able to use the software to go out to the end user and prove we can make it. Before, you were working a Power BI spreadsheet — you can make it look however you want. The visibility for our operations and estimating teams to look at projected manpower needs versus prospective work helps us align and make sure we don't get in a spot where we can't staff jobs. We could possibly double our workforce over the next 18 months with the hyperscale work in-house.

Good field leaders are the foundation of every electrical contractor. Is that a challenge if you double? It definitely will be. We've had to move some of the younger leaders into bigger roles. With the mega work, we joint venture, so partners bring in some of their supervision who've worked in that market — that expertise in-house makes a big difference.

Has RIVET had an impact on your ability to run and staff jobs? With our labor team, being able to see who's out there, look at the mapping, see where people live, see where the projects are, look at their certifications and trainings and align with what we're doing — it helps a lot. Our operational leaders have more transparency about what's going on, who's scheduled, who's there, and can contact them through the software. We never really had that before.

I've heard Dave say we turn down work right now, because we can see. You evaluate work, you turn it down. You're smarter about how and where you take on work, because you want to provide a good product for the customer. And you brought David up — our president and CEO. He's in the weeds to a degree; he needs the resources and analytics to make true business decisions and not put us at risk.

Why did you choose to work with us? We had a similar software before that wasn't nearly as advanced. It got bought up and we didn't like where it went, so we had to find something else. You guys are the leader and the most advanced, and meeting with your team — their knowledge, their willingness to work with us and spend time — it's not just a money transaction. It's, we want you to be successful so we can be successful. If you can make me money, I can make you money, and we both succeed.

What got the executive buy-in? Being able to manage our manpower and have something visible we could use with our project managers on needs and wants, where everybody sees the same thing. We weren't looking at chalkboards or magnetic boards or pieces of paper. To see their face, contact info, certs, tags, place them on projects, have a manpower curve that relates to the work we do, and use that as the project slips or pulls or pushes — that's nice for our back end too.

Any pleasant surprises? We have a couple of different softwares, and yours being one that we can call and get an answer and resolution. Others can take a week or two. The flexibility and nimbleness — you've written new code for us and helped with all our integrations. We might have been one of the first for COINS ERP that you integrated with. Helping us along, understanding we're not programmers, was very nice.

How are you using RIVET inside ERMCO? Once we're awarded a job, my team makes it active from prospective. Once it's entered into COINS, the opportunity number transitions to a job number, then it's handed off to our director of field operations who manages all the labor — placement, moves, service tags. We're more administrative in my department. Field leaders doing requests and flagging? Not today — I'd love that to happen, and hopefully we'll get there. PMs forecast monthly: the executive team does projections for every project, then the next week they go in and forecast, and we red-flag against the projected and have discussions. We pull total and actual man-hours and labor rates out of the ERP, plus projected hours to completion, so it ties to everything in RIVET.

How would you describe the overall impact of adopting RIVET at ERMCO? It's a big deal. If we hadn't done it, especially with the amount of work in the market today, we could have taken on more than we should have. We would have done it and gotten it done, but not been as good at the job, and definitely not as profitable. The visibility of where we're at is immense. It's a huge asset to our company, and I wouldn't want to go away from it at this given point.