What it’s worth.

On any given day, this contractor has more than 100 electricians on site at their largest plant-maintenance client. Over the course of a shift, one technician might touch four or five different work orders, so the crew as a whole is working several hundred work orders a day.

Every one of those touches has to land on the right work order to get billed and collected. The codes are 16 characters long. The crews were tracking them by hand, in notebooks, in the field.

That is a lot of money riding on a number written down between tasks.

They knew they weren’t seeing the profit the work should have produced. They just couldn’t pin down why.

Their accounting and project-management system was built for contractors, but it didn’t go deep enough to reconcile time paid against time billed against time collected at the granularity their contract demanded. So the gap stayed hidden. They could feel it without being able to point at it.

They went to the market looking for two things at once: a more capable system, and a better way to track cost and activity on site.

We implemented Vista across the business and built a custom timekeeping solution. Through Vista and our ability to augment it, we were able to deliver a solution that allowed crews to capture their work against the right work order in real time.

After implementation, the team was able to go back and identify over $1.4 million in labor that had incurred and never collected over the past couple of years. Plugging that leak now accounts for up to $500,000 a year in properly billed labor hours.

Specialty Welding & Turnarounds provides construction and turnaround services for the refining, petrochemical, and ammonia markets across North America. The work scales hard: headcount runs from 850 to more than 2,400 several times a year as turnarounds ramp up and wind down.

SWAT had outgrown their previous ERP software. The team spent too much time entering information into a system that wasn’t built for their business, and that inefficiency led to missed billings and inaccurate data.

We implemented a job-costing solution in Viewpoint Vista, built for the way SWAT staffs a turnaround, which gained real efficiency over what they had been using. We then layered in Chroma, our reporting product, to give their team real-time visibility into the numbers.

In year one, the move returned about $170,000: roughly $100,000 in improved job billing and $70,000 a year in recovered staff time. Just as important, SWAT gained real-time insight into the business as it scaled.