The 2020 HCSS Users Group Meeting featured more than 1,344 attendees from 370+ companies learning about the HCSS platform, sharing solutions and best practices with each other, providing feedback to help the HCSS software better fit their needs, and enjoying socializing with other industry leaders. At our one-on-one support stations; in the roundtables, town halls, and classes; and at our fun-filled party at St. Arnold’s Brewery, we heard great stories from our customers. Here are a few of our favorites.
Meeting ISO Standards with HCSS
“We started down the road of being certified under ISO9001, ISO14001 and ISO 45001. There are maybe half a dozen construction companies in the US that are ISO certified, and there are maybe 2 or 3 that have what’s called an integrated management system, which involves more than one standard of the ISO series. We’ll have all three of those. HCSS is absolutely instrumental in helping us achieve that. Without HCSS, we would absolutely have to have more headcount, spend a lot more hours both onsite and in the office to validate that we’re doing what we say we’re going to do.”
-- Michael Cannell, JF Brennan
Preventing Future Mistakes
HCSS Plans is changing the way that foremen communicate with each other. A foreman was doing a utility locate, and found the utility line to only be 6 inches under the ground. He went through the normal process of documenting the issue in HCSS Field using the diary and photos portions.
But he had time to think on it, and went back and put those notes and photos into HCSS Plans, showing on the plan set exactly where it happened. Now any other foreman that went to do their work would see this important photo and notes, hopefully preventing damage to that same utility by a different foreman.
-- Hal Fuglevand, Knife River Construction
Saving Time for Maximum Efficiency
“HeavyBid is the only estimating software I’ve ever used. This is the third company I’ve worked for in the construction industry, so I don’t know any other estimating software, and I don’t really care to know them. I love HeavyBid. I love all the features I can get out of it. There are so many things that HCSS has done that speeds up our lives as estimators.
[HCSS] continues to improve upon those whenever possible, and it’s fantastic for us in the working world, when we’re trying to put bids together and we’re not spending hours plugging up bid item prices for all sorts of DOTs. It’s pretty wonderful.”
-- Brent Freeman, Kraemer North America
Avoiding Late Payments to Crew
“I was a payroll administrator, so I worked heavily out of HeavyJob. The reports that HCSS has helped us build have been phenomenal.They’ve helped us prevent guys getting paid late, and that’s one of our biggest goals: to make sure everyone is paid on time and correctly. [HeavyJob has] helped us slow down from having to do make-up cards because of the reports that we were able to get out. So thank you for that! There’s nothing I would change about the process at all. Not at all. We rely on HeavyBid and HeavyJob religiously. They’ve used HCSS since I started with the company. I don’t know what we would do without it, honestly.”
-- Rachelle Trujillo, Granite Construction
Cross-Company Collaboration at UGM
“My favorite part of UGM is just getting to interact with everybody. All the companies that are here, we’re all working together to try to figure out how to make America build better stuff, faster. There’s been a lot of collaboration in roundtables and small groups where you talk about the problems, you talk about the good things and bad things, and you give advice. You say, hey, we had that same problem, too, and here’s what we’ve done. There’s a lot of help, and everyone wants to make you better.”
-- Andrew Nardella, C. J. Mahan Construction
Want to join us for the next UGM? At UGM 2021, we’ll be focusing on providing practical, actionable templates and tips that attendees can immediately put to work back at the office. We know our customers are always trying to do more with less, especially in the current state of the world, so this will be a UGM focused on direct problem solving.
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