850 Field Workers Across 5 States. Now Poynter Drops Live Workforce Maps Into Every Bid.

Thanks for joining and being part of the Champ program. A brief introduction and your role? I'm Zach Piercey, vice president of sales at Poynter Sheet Metal. The entire time I've been here I've been in the background doing technology stuff, helping integrate and roll things out. I started in project management, developed a project controls department, then shifted to the sell side — but I work on making the software useful to the end user. Kyle Wilson, I've been with Poynter 15 years, started in the trades and worked my way up. I'm general field superintendent now, in charge of all field labor for the company throughout the country, and the primary user as far as moves with the software — managing over 850 people currently.

Where do you operate? We're in five states right now, throughout most of the Midwest and North Carolina. The majority of our work is Indiana, Kentucky, and western Ohio. We also source prefab for a couple of customers up in Michigan — Kramer is one of our partners.

Biggest takeaway from the workshop so far? It shined some light on focusing on scheduling — it's the hardest thing to do. We have a solid base; we started really implementing about a year ago. It's crazy to see how different it is for Kyle with the resource. Before, it was text messages everywhere. My immediate thought when we first saw it was, holy cow, this is going to move so much work off of Kyle. We're in the dispatching phase looking toward scheduling, and on the back end we can see the forecast — a year ago I wouldn't be comfortable saying how many guys we need a month from now, but now we could get that within 5 to 6 months out.

Labor planning used to be a gut feel — I have too many people, I need to look at layoffs, based on what I thought was coming. Now we're looking at summer projects in May, talking about August. Seeing other contractors, I feel like we're right on pace. It's a huge undertaking to get this firing on all cylinders, so it's reassuring to see the struggles others have had and how they've handled the same issues.

Are you seeing less time on scheduling and dispatch? Before, my process was archaic — I'd send multiple text messages to move one person. The foreman saw the maps, start times, things like that through text. Now I can do that on a computer; more information goes out to more people with less clicks. It took getting used to, but it's an extremely efficient way of moving them, and we have multiple people using the software now where previously I was sending a lot of the messages. We can see what moves have been made, and it all comes through the same way to the field.

It was cool to see a lot of the tangent tasks get completed — OSHA logs, who's got their ten-hour, all of that living with the individual. Our safety guys are using it more. When we did implementation, we realized we'd never updated emergency contact info. Now a foreman gets a new employee and gets all their certifications and who to contact if something happens. One of the biggest time-saving things I didn't foresee is that information I used to reach out to other departments for — email addresses, phone numbers, badging and project info — it's all on the baseball card, and we keep it current. None of the HR or ERP systems are meant for the field or operations team, so it's huge having it in the hands of the people who make decisions about which people are on which projects.

It's cut down drastically on phone calls and text messages. The communication is so much more transparent now between myself and the foreman and the project managers. They get to see who's coming to the projects, where before they had no idea. I had a spreadsheet I kept private — that's how we kept track. It was up to me, after multiple texts and calls, to highlight the spreadsheet and keep everybody in the right spot. It was nowhere near as accurate as what we're doing now.

Are you using RIVET in business development? Turning down work is not in our culture — we're going to go for everything, so it's never a go/no-go decision. It's twofold: it lets us overlay upcoming projects we know are coming, so I can give Kyle a heads-up — here's this job, here's the field hours, the rough schedule. And I'll use it to create manpower curves to send to customers with a proposal. Down to using the employee map — workforce availability is a big thing in our areas. I can pinpoint where a job is going to be, draw a 30-mile radius, and say we have X employees within it. It helps us outshine others. I've even overlaid a project to show a customer it would make up 3% of our company — a little easier to swallow than just saying we can do it.

We've used those labor curves on a couple of jobs to show schedule compression and what it does to the number of people, to help execute change orders. When you cut two or three months off our schedule and the end date doesn't move, this is the increased labor we're seeing. To map that out instead of just saying we have more people — we can show live data and what it's doing to the job. That really helped seal the deal on some of those.

Biggest benefit to the company? On the field side, the ability to execute and set up project teams and scale what I was doing locally. I started doing it in three states, and now we're doing it in five with considerably more people, taking the same process and duplicating it over and over to manage labor and keep everything organized. The transparency throughout the company — I can see who's in North Carolina on which projects, track what locals are there. It makes me wonder how I ever did it with my spreadsheet.

It's cool that Kyle and I look at the same overall manpower chart. We see a drop in January coming down, and that tells me I can get more aggressive on those projects to build backlog. Kyle seeing that, and me making decisions to fill it back up, helps level those peaks and valleys, makes Kyle's job easier, and keeps people employed.

What's it like working with the RIVET team? We have a pretty intricate ERP, and our IT department likes to keep things locked down. Getting the RIVET team integrated with our software and getting the data out of our ERP was probably our biggest success. We write up a job on the sales side and within an hour it's in RIVET and everyone can see it — we put the projection in and adjust the overall manpower. At these events you can see you're wanting to develop the software but also listening to the headaches and ironing them out. We succeed, you succeed — that was a big factor in signing up. The implementation was great; we threw as many hurdles as we could — we're affiliated with other companies, so we needed a wall between the two so we weren't pulling in all the hours — but it went great.

My biggest concern was whether it's user-friendly for myself and our field staff. The Rosie chats and real-time help — you don't feel stuck or lost. When we rolled out, we had a couple of foremen who didn't get signed up with the right email, and within our hour training session we had them up and active. That live support helped put us at ease.

What would you tell other contractors evaluating RIVET? Look at who's scheduling your manpower and how, and what they think four weeks from now looks like. If they're spinning their wheels and can't tell you a range, that was the first thing we thought of when we saw the software. RIVET has probably saved years of Kyle's life with how easy it is getting the information out. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, but you've got a lens now within all the projects — there's a huge dollar value, and we see it. On my end, the scalability — we talked to contractors managing 100 people and others managing 1,400, and it's the same software. The flexibility really impressed me.