“The field adoption was easy and I’ve gotten no complaints. We have a diverse field team and they have all found StructShare easy.”
Hargrave Electric, a company over 35 years old, has seen many solutions claiming to solve their pain easily. Recently, the pain of maintaining the same purchasing and materials management process became too much. They needed a speciality contractor software solution that would work for them. They found that with StructShare.
Like many electrical contractors, Hargrave Electric had to decide to find a digital solution to their pain or to keep fighting the pains of status quo. They were fighting the painstaking and disorganized purchasing and material management process. Field requests would reach the purchasing team in a variety of ways such as texts, texts with pictures, phone calls, and even faxes. These requests were then handwritten by the purchasing team and faxed to suppliers.
The pain did not end there. Invoice reconciliation also was a pain they wanted to fight. This manual process included hard copy POs being compared to hard copy invoices. Suppliers were often called or emailed directly to work through any and all discrepancies.
Challenges of this way of working:
The results of these challenges included duplicated orders, disregarded invoices if not considered “large” enough to worry about, and uncertainty that they were paying for on the invoices.
Hargrave Electric wanted a better, simpler, and more affordable way to standardize the purchase and material management process and reduce the administrative burden on the office manager, purchasing manager, and field supervisors. That's not all. They needed to engage the field teams on an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile app to promote field requests, store all POs in one system, track item deliveries, and gain insight into job costing. Most important, they needed a solution for THEIR needs and not a solution they would have to adapt to. They needed StructShare in their corner to win this fight against their pain.
“When looking for a tech partner I looked for someone that would adapt to my needs, not make me adapt to their product, and StructShare has been really good about that and I’ve appreciated it.”
Since implementing StructShare, Hargrave Electric has eliminated the pain felt in their previous purchasing and material management process and in the process of doing that, they have also seen tremendous cost savings. In addition, the field team now sends requests to the office on their desktop or mobile devices all within defined rules based on management controls. The office team no longer spends time hunting down information; they know it’s all in StructShare. All of this keeps everyone on the same page.
High level results:
Overall, Hargrave Electric decreased time on manual data entry and material requisitions, which also eliminated delay errors. These benefits help them maintain their goal of “on time, on budget and always reliable.”
“We used to buy tons of those triplicate form PO documents and now we don’t have to, which quickly alleviated cost.”
With users in the field and in the office, it was important to have a tool that offered support for all. With StructShare, Hargrave Electric is able to get questions answered quickly by email or by in-app chats. All teams involved adopted the tool quickly into their daily routine and found the intuitiveness of StructShare helped them get through the system quickly and easily. In addition, the StructShare customer success team helps us maximize the value of the tool by being proactive and reaching out to us with hints and tips.
Hargrave Electric, President Bryan Hargrave says, “Yes, I would certainly recommend StructShare today.”
“We originally thought we would use this with just one or two of our vendors, but now we use StructShare to order from all of them, it has made the process really easy!”
Hargrave Electric, a design-build electrical contracting firm located in Houston, Texas, provides services for projects that range from small service work to multi-million-dollar projects involving state-of-the-art electrical installations. They are a family-owned business that strives to meet customers’ needs foremost with a focus on providing turnkey electrical installations to end-users providing the customer with a final product that is on time and on budget.