Better Roads Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/109757
– Adam Kuyt, risk control and contract manager, Flatiron system from HCSS, Hard Dollar and Bid2Win. You put your labor hours and your equipment hours into their system and it uses standard costs and compares that to the budget that the estimating system originally set for that activity – paving or grading, or whatever. "But not all of the costs on the job are coming through that mechanism," says Burger. "To get a comprehensive cost, you still need your accounting system. But to get immediate productivity and manpower – probably the most variable things on the job – contractors are starting to use HCSS, Bid2Win and Hard Dollar because they have these field-based reporting packages. For several months, Flatiron Corp., a large heavy/highway contractor based in Colorado, has been using Heavy Job from HCSS to compare real-time production data with estimates. "There are multiple reports that are available from the system, hard-coded basic reports from the Heavy Job system that tell you what your production is today relative to your estimated or your original budget that you uploaded into the system," says Adam Kuyt, risk control and contract manager for Flatiron. "It does the comparison calculations, and it tells you whether or not the unit cost of the work that you performed today was in line with the budget, or over budget, or under budget. And it gives you a report of how many dollars you either made or lost on an activity that day." Flatiron is also starting to implement Heavy Job on a mobile application – with iPads. "We've been testing that in the field," says Kuyt. "The field foremen can have an iPad to do timecards." Before, foremen used a laptop computer or a PC that had to be connected to the Internet. With an iPad, a foreman can simply store the timecard information. When he gets to a place with an Internet connection, he can download his timecard onto Flatiron's enterprise server. "He just sends his timecard up, kind of like an email," says Kuyt. "We're going toward the goal of not having paper timecards any longer," says Kuyt. "And the guys aren't required to keep a paper diary that tells what they did that day. The diary can be done on the iPad, and then he hits a button to send his timecard up and can send the diary notes at the same time. And all of that data is now stored on a server where the data is backed up. You're not going to lose anything. Gone are the days of looking for a field notebook two years after the job is complete." Does Heavy Job help Flatiron make money? "That's exactly our reason for adapting Heavy Job," says Kuyt. "We wanted to make sure that our foreman in the field, who is performing the work, knows whether or not he was profitable on the units that he produced that day. I think that feedback loop will encourage foremen to be thinking about improving productivity on every single shift because they know what they did yesterday." Kuyt says it's still too early to tell if the company is actually accomplishing that, but that's the goal. Another program that permits checking daily costs against a budget comes from B2W Software, formerly known as BID2WIN Software. The company supplies a program called B2W Track, which has been on the market for about four years, says Paul McKeon, CEO of B2W Software. B2W Track can be used alone or together with the company's Dispatch and Maintain modules as one unified solution. All modules are browser-based, so no software needs to be installed on each computer running the programs, and all operational data is always up to date and available in real time. Better Roads February 2013 7