The eager contenders lined up, spilling into the aisle of the convention, to compete at the HCSS booth for the fastest time card until the very last day of the 2023 Las Vegas CONEXPO-CON/AGG in March. By the end of the week, a new champion was crowned Time Card Champion.
The Time Card Challenge provides an opportunity for any convention attendee to quickly learn how HeavyJob time cards work, establish a workflow, and then complete a timed challenge that can be sent into the office.
Armed with a blank time card and HCSS HeavyJob, the challenger is tested to see how long would it take them to document employees in their crew, log hours worked and equipment used, assign their time to cost that could be tracked in accounting, show production for the day, describe the jobsite conditions in a diary, and attach relevant photos while annotating the importance of the photo before hitting the send to office button that marked the end of the timer.
2023 Time Card Challenge Champion
Our crowned HeavyJob Time Card Champion in 2020 was 9-year employee and Project Manager at Comanco, Dan McRae, who completed the challenge in under 1 minute and 17 seconds. Proudly, Dan was promoted to Vice President by the time he returned for the 2023 ConExpo, bringing an army of Comanco employees back to defend his title.
The hopefuls surrounding the booth to claim their time (and beer) were relentless, and although each challenger was only given one chance to submit their fastest time card, every day provided a narrowing margin on our past winners’ time.
When the dust settled on the final day of ConExpo, the new champion from Independence Excavating, Joe Neubert, took home the title with a crushing time of 1 minute and 7 seconds.
“I came over because I heard there was free beer if you do a time card challenge, and when I saw the belt, I knew I wanted to win it,” said Joe. “We use HCSS for everything, and I am intimately involved with coordinating those products on our side.”
Joe has worked at Independence Excavating for 10 years. He began his career in construction as a sophomore attending the University of Pittsburgh where he interned at Independence and learned to love construction. He has been an HCSS user since day one and now teaches others how to use the technology to improve efficiency and build safer.
Tighter Estimates with HeavyJob Field Data
His expertise in taking newly won estimates and conforming them to cost codes and advanced budgets for their accounting system and in HeavyJob is only part of what he is able to do quickly using HCSS - other than completing a time card in record time.
Once they’ve exported their estimate into HeavyJob, they can see all the bid equipment and production that the estimator allocated for each phase of work for the job. And by collecting how the foremen actually perform in the field with regular time cards, the field data can be used by estimators to see how their crews actually performed, creating even tighter estimates.
“HCSS helps us improve our office space communication,” says Joe. “With estimate notes, quantity reporting, and all the time and cost reporting, HeavyJob is a tool that is very good at being simple and user-friendly, which increases the chance of gathering accurate information. That’s what we’re after. Every time a foreman enters time, their diary, or quantities correctly that tells the story of what happened, and is one less conversation I need to have with our field managers that takes up both of our time.
I can see immediately, here are the cost code notes, here is what he was working on, here is the quantity, and here are the issues of the day in the diary. It streamlines everything.”
Joe says that because they have the right tools, their communication happens organically, and they can spend more time serving the customers, and less time trying to calculate how to stay on budget.
“Our customer focus makes it a lot easier to come to work knowing the goal. We are a business that needs to keep our team safe. But we are not going to battle every day with the owner for every cent, because I treat them as a customer and do whats right,” says Joe. “Of the 10 years I’ve been here, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth, but we keep that spirit of entrepreneurial family business, and we get along because we talk to each other.”
HCSS congratulates Joe for his spirit of communication, and the ability to think quickly and teach others how to paint a picture of the field for the office.
The next CONEXPO-CON/AGG will be in 2026. You have three years to practice, get better, get faster, and be more accurate so that when you come to Las Vegas in 2026, you can challenge Joe for the title of Time Card Champion.
