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Harold Brothers Mechanical Contractors Case Study
BACKGROUND
“Introduce your business and what you do there.”
“Steven Koski, Outside Labor Superintendent/Safety Officer, Harold Brothers Mechanical. Harold Brothers Mechanical Contractors, Inc. is a privately held mechanical construction company based in Eastern Massachusetts. Being a full service organization we are able to provide total mechanical construction including HVAC, Plumbing, process piping, refrigeration, pre-fabrication, rigging, energy management and temperature control.”
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
“What challenge were you trying to address with Snappii?”
“The business challenge was lack of good project documentation. Without it, it is hard to prove in court what was or was not done and what Harold Brothers delivered. Documentation is also needed to prove to clients why something was not done as agreed. For example, the client or the site was not ready when Harold Brothers’ people show up. Good documentation is also critical for planning how to deploy crew members on various projects. Biggest challenge is training especially for seasoned Foremen. To over come we did extra training.
There is a large amount of Foremen in the field who are doing the Daily Reports. Harold Bros has a substantial amount of people working in the field and about 40 in the office. I personally manage all of the Outside projects at one time.
Our team needs to fill in a decent amount of forms on a daily basis. Forms can get lost, not always delivered to the office, it’s hard to read sometimes what it says, etc. We know that businesses have been turning to mobile forms lately and we decided to give it a try and convert our paper-based process into mobile forms app. We wanted to automate manual processes, share documents, track tasks, and collect and store data with mobile forms. Besides, we needed to improve collaboration between the field and office teams.”
SOLUTION
“What was the scope of Snappii’s involvement?”
“The main idea for the application was to convert our existing paper forms we use on a daily basis. We needed to organize Timesheets, Pipe test reports, HVAC and Plumbing sheets, as well as track job on site daily reports.
We were also looking for the following features:
- Automated time sheet reporting — time sheets to automatically be emailed to appropriate individual’s EOD Fridays
- Signature fields
- Input fields
- Calculations
- Forms to be saved in the app
- Forms to be custom PDF output and Excel output
“We also needed the app to be used internally in our organization as well as control who has access to it.”
“How did you come to work with Snappii?”
“We found them online and looked at several of their past apps. We have been testing the daily log app with some of our foremen and really like the look and use of that one. So we decided to give them a try.”
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
“Are you happy with the result?”
“We’re really happy with the progress. The app has been published privately and shared among specific list of people. The app has user-based access. Now it literally takes a few minutes to fill out the report, sign and send it. We receive a convenient PDF output that’s stored in the app and also can be shared via email, cloud drives and printed, if needed.
Snappii’s QA team used some automated and manual tests on performance and troubleshooting and found the app to be stable. I can’t blame them for any issues because it’s up and running. I’m sure it will work fine moving forward.
All our employees were trained how to use the app. In future we expect to cut down time and expenses significantly using this mobile app.”
“How did Snappii perform from a project management standpoint?”
“The process was straightforward, fast, and pleasant. We had phone calls and email conversations to make sure the app will work exactly how we needed. They were really proactive and responsive. We are quite satisfied.”
“What did you find most impressive about them?”
“They’re really responsive. We were interested in getting the app as soon as possible. We are very satisfied with the collaboration; the Snappii team was responsive and provided good communication. We are impressed with their stability. Snappii has been present in this industry since 2011, and they’ve created many apps which we downloaded and reviewed ourselves, finding them to be stable.”
