Track, Analyze, Act: Turning Field Data into Your Competitive Advantage

Thank you for for joining our our webinar today, track, analyze, act, turning your field data into your competitive advantage. My name is Reed Renfrow. I'm the product marketing manager here at HCSS. I am joined by two of my colleagues, Chris O'Connor. Chris is our senior technical product manager for our HCSS Fleet products. And then, we also have Michaela Halliwell. She is the group product manager for our platform and data products. Each of them are going to be going through some of the products that they cover inside of the HCSS platform, so that you'll hear from both of them throughout the day. One quick housekeeping note, we do want to get any questions you might have answered, you're current customer, you're a prospect, you're interested in learning more about HCSS, please use the q and a function inside of Zoom. We'll be monitoring that throughout the the presentation, and we should have some time to answer some of those questions live at the end. So, go ahead. Anything you you want answered, nothing's off limits. Please go ahead and ask it there. Alright. So we we wanted to just prep you with some of the key takeaways that we want you to kind of walk away from this webinar from. First is precision field intelligence. Really, one of the key one of the most important things that HCSS does is help your crews in the field get data and capture the data that they need for all the projects they're working on, and get that information back to your office and and your other systems that record your payroll, your accounting. So this is an key thing that we're going to talk about. Talk about some strategic resource forecasting through our new resource planner product that launched just last year. Chris is gonna talk through equipment optimization and telematics, and some of the great features that you can get from those those products. And then Michaela's gonna walk through our unified reporting with HCSS Insights and kind of how you can get all this data and tie it all together through Insights and get information where it's needed inside of your company. So first, I'm gonna go through HeavyJob. For those of you that might not be familiar, HeavyJob is our strut our our field product. It has structured cost coding. We'll talk a little bit about real time performance tracking. One of the the key features it has is our ERP integrations, and I'll talk to you a little bit about how that works. Some of the key integrations with Heavybid are estimating product, and how that can make you a proactive decision maker and get you the information you need. So, when you boil down to like what's the core of HeavyJob, I think it all starts with the time card. So, this is a view of what a foreman would see out in the field as an iPad screen. We have our HCSS field mobile app here. And and this is where in terms of getting that data captured, it all begins. So, your foreman out in the field, they can pull in their crew, they can pull in cost codes that their crew worked on, they can put in the number of hours. Each person, they can they can split hours for different parts of the crew. They can all it's easy to to put in hour all that same hours for everyone. And then you also see equipment there. So we can track equipment hours here in HeavyJob. And and one thing we we constantly know is there's there's foremen that have used paper time cards for a long time, or they have a lot of systems they're used to. And so, we really spent a lot of time trying to make this intuitive as possible. We just came back from ConExpo where we ran a time card challenge for Foreman, people at that that equipment that expo, and people are able to submit a time card in under under a minute. So this is something that that is pretty easy to do, but also really captures important data and information that your company needs to know exactly how you're performing out in the field. So, again, you can track you can track cost codes. We only have two cost codes here, but you can put way far more cost codes on this crew on on this time card. You can have a much bigger crew. You can even show have multi job time cards where your crew is working on different jobs throughout the day. So, there there's a lot of different options that can be set up for how your company is working. Next, another key key piece of that of our time cards, a little bit unique is I just clicked over here to the estimate notes tab. And if you're using HeavyBid or or any of your or any of your estimates and bidding, one of the great features that we have inside of HeavyJob is it will pull the estimate notes into the field app. So, this is just an example of what a foreman might see. They can click on this estimate note notes tab. They can sort by cost code. And they can really see what was the estimator thinking when they were submitting that bid. So, if they're running behind budget or they're a little bit confused about, like, the resources that that they might be using, you could see all of that here. So, you see the estimate resources. You see the estimate notes. This can be valuable in the field. Your your foreman doesn't have to call into a project manager back in the office to get this information if something doesn't look right. They're able to see it straight on their iPad in the field anytime they want. So, one of the one of the key integrations that we want to highlight is is that We're bringing that data from HeavyBid into HeavyJob for those foremen. Next, I want to talk about the opposite direction. So, just like you can get estimate notes into the field, one one another way you can help your estimators is getting production data into HeavyBid. So, Heavy, HeavyJob allows you to track how you're performing cost code by by cost code. You can have standardized cost codes across your company. And then, we have an integration with HeavyBid where that production data from HeavyJob gets transferred into HeavyBid. So, your your estimators, if they're they're doing a new estimate, they're not just assuming and guessing what those production rates are. They can use projects that are similar to what they've been bidding on. They can use more recent projects. So, if things have changed in the last two, three, four years since they have updated those rates, like, this is a great way to get the best possible data from HeavyJob back into HeavyBid. Now, I'll talk a little bit about how you link, how we set up HeavyJob to work with both your payroll and your ERP and accounting systems. So, we have a number of integrations with different payroll and ERP providers. And we have different We They all use different formats. So, we've built in integrations. You can see a number of them listed on the screen there, QuickBooks, Sage, Viewpoint, JDE. We most major payroll or accounting systems will have an integration with. And this allows you to get that data that your your foreman are recording into the field, whether it's how many hours your employees are working so that your crews can get paid each week, whether it's the how much what what they what how much work was accomplished, materials and equipment costs that you're tracking out in the field. All that data is in HeavyJob, but we know that's not where you're keeping your books. HeavyJob is not an accounting system. So, in order for that data to be useful, you're going to need to get it from HeavyJob into your ERP. And we try to make that as easy as possible for you. Another great thing that HCSS has is we have a great professional services team, and if you're implementing HeavyJob, they will work with you. They will walk you through how this all works. One of their key goals is a part of that implementation is to get this process specifically set up. Because it's great to have this data in HeavyJob, but that's not really where you'll ultimately need it. You'll need it in whether that's QuickBooks, Sage, JDE. You'll need it in those accounting systems so that you can get accurate data or your financial statements and then tracking the accounting for your company. Then the last feature I wanted to showcase in HeavyJob is one of our newest that we launched just last year is Map View. So, one of the one of the things that we realized is depending on what your role is in inside of a company, you need to consume data in a in a different way. And so for for project managers that might be back in the field or executives that want to get an overview of how their projects are going, we found maps can be very effective way to track performance of projects. So, this is just a quick example of of something you might see on map view there. I highlighted different photos and inspections. You can also see equipment on-site. If you are using HCSS or HeavyJob Plans, you're able to go in and see those plan sheets straight from this map view. And you can really visualize the project, and you can also identify potential areas of concern. So, you can even filter for failed inspections. So, you could even look if there are an area on the job site where there's more inspections that are failing. And course correct and find out what's going on there. Why are all these inspections failing? You can go and quickly click around to different jobs. And it's something we're gonna continue trying to add new data in. And so this isn't this is really just the beginning. We think this is could be a hub where project managers, executives can come in and quickly get performance information across your projects, click around, see what's happening, see photos, see progress, and and get an overview of of your jobs, whether that's in in a certain region or anywhere across the US and Canada. Next, I want to talk a little bit about Resource Planner and some of the data that you can get out of here that can be effective. This is one of our our newest products that's really only been available for about six months now. We're really excited about what it can offer customers in terms of scheduling. So really, like, Resource Planner all is all about trying to maximize utilization. So whether that's equipment utilization, it's maximizing your your crew resources. You can you're able to schedule crews, equipment, and then forecast what your needs might be. So, if you maybe need new equipment, you need you're you're running short on certain specialty crew types, can go and you can plan out your project pipeline and see where any gaps might be. And so, like at the heart of Resource Planner is is this smart scheduling tool. So, can schedule by multiple different there's multiple different ways to schedule. You can schedule by you can schedule equipment as you see here. You can schedule by crew. You can schedule by job. You can schedule individuals on a certain project. And you can schedule whether it's one week or two weeks ahead. You can try to plan out what your project pipeline is gonna look three months, six months, a year in advance, and get crews on the schedule. And then we're we're continuing to build out integrations with with Resource Planner, integrating it into the the HCSS Field App that I that I showed earlier, making sure foremen know who's scheduled on their for their crew each day. Also, out your employees by enabling text message notifications for their assignments of where they're going each day. So we're gonna continue building out integrations throughout the next year with Resource Planner, but we're really excited about the the opportunity that it offers you in terms of in terms of scheduling and and understanding where your resource is going and doing that in the most efficient way possible. And then next, we have a a view here. This is a a dash dashboard view inside of Resource Planner. It's really looking at utilization. So this is again, it it's great to it's important to be able to communicate and schedule those crews, but really to get the most value out of it, you need to be able to forecast where where your crew's going, where you might have gaps, any equipment that look is looking a little bit tight. It can help you understand if you need to rent new equipment for an upcoming job. Maybe you wanna purchase new equipment. It helps you make those decisions. And or could see if you have if you have a bunch of equipment that's not going to be utilized. Maybe you're you wanna sell something, maybe you don't need to rent anything, etcetera. So, wanna give a quick sneak peek here of Resource Planner. There's a lot of great data that that you can capture here. And again, as I mentioned, it's one of our newest products here at HCSS. We want make sure people are aware of it, and want to get ideas on on how we can integrate it even more into our into our HeavyJob portfolio with other HCSS products going forward. So, again, if you have any questions, I see I think we've got a few coming here in the chat. We'll answer those at the end. But again, if you have any questions about anything I talked about on on HeavyJob or Resource Planner for the future presentations that Chris and Michaela are going to do, please please go ahead and ask those, we'll make sure we get those answered. With that, Chris, I'm going to turn it over to you. Alright, thanks Reed. So, going on utilization, kind of continuing from there, I want to talk on the telematics side, you know, the most utilization out of what is the most expensive thing on your job site, and that's your equipment. So knowing how much it's run, knowing, you know, fuel levels, if it's being idling too much, kind of whatever utilization metrics you wanna see, that's something we can capture with telematics. So our whole philosophy with HCSS Telematics in particular is giving you a single pane of glass, an integration hub to see all of your assets from your mixed fleet. So whether you're using our first party hardware, the hardware built in on your machines from VisionLink, from John Deere, from various other providers, or even another third party like Samsara or Geotab, we want to pull all that information into one screen for you to make decisions on without having to click around and compare numbers across different tabs and different systems. And so what we've built, one of the screens we've built is going be our analytics dashboard. So this gives you a thousand foot overview of your entire fleet, you know, again, whether it's our hardware, OEM hardware, or any other third party, of what they're doing right now, and you can drill down in and see more information about why this one has been idling for forty minutes, or I'm seeing a lower utilization on this than I should, And then with that data, you can dig in further to look at individual pieces of equipment to see how it was utilized on the day, on the time card. So with our hardware specifically, you can really get an idea of the day of the equipment. So, we can see here on our insights screen that really gives you a view into when it was running, so when we have ignition status on and running, when it was ignition on but just sitting there idling, what actions were taken when, in this case, the fault code popped up, or I got a high coolant tip alert and it seems like no one paid attention and it just kept running. So, it lets you see, one, historical, but also real time data of how your equipment is behaving and being treated, because again, it's the most expensive thing on that job site. When it goes down, it's costing you money and not making you money. Now, Telematics specifically, there's a few ways that we look at utilization in system, and we'll also talk about how we do it out of system as well and stuff like three sixty and helping with HeavyJob. But in the Telematics website, there's three main ways you can see. So, you're going have your idle versus non-idle. So, how much time that equipment was on, we're going to break that down for you based on working time, engine running at a high RPM working, and then sitting there running burning fuel and wasting your money. It can really help with operational bottlenecks and improving logistics on knowing where things need to be or seeing which equipment is being idled too much or which foremen potentially are just keying something on at the beginning of a day to get an ignition cycle to keep the equipment on their site. Then there's run time versus expected work time. So, we can set up eight hours of expected work time per day for a week, and then compare that to the actual run time to know if you're over utilizing or under utilizing a piece of equipment. Then with our reporting, we'll look at later, you can know if over utilizing a piece of equipment, if you need to go and rent a new one or move one from another site to this site, again, getting the most out of all your equipment based on the data that we're pulling in from the machines. Then one of our newer metrics is gonna be build time versus actual run time. This is going to compare the time card hours versus actual run time hours from key on, key off on the machine. This helps ensure that you're billing jobs correctly and that the info moving out to your accounting systems is accurate, but also keeps people from hoarding equipment on jobs that they may not be using that could be utilized elsewhere. So, in that line, I'm gonna pull up, this is gonna be an example of the time card exception report, and if we zoom into it, we can see, so our foreman here, Hansen, has billed five hours to his time card today, but it didn't even run at his job. It ran at the shop, so maybe it's being worked on and key on, key off throughout the day. So one, we have a variance of time, but we also know that Hansen's charging time on his time card to a machine that one isn't even at his location and that he's definitely not utilizing. So maybe we need to talk with Hansen or update our resource planner to make sure things are aligned with where they're actually running. And then another one that really helps with your utilization is going to be the equipment availability. We also call it the rental alternative. So this gives you a utilization over fourteen days of a specific type of equipment that you may need at a site. So, in this case, at our fivetwenty nine job, I need a dozer. I'm looking to rent one, or if I can see what's nearby that hasn't run much in the last two weeks, maybe I can just move one over. So I would look here, I see O2-one hundred thirty. It's about three miles away at a different job. It's only rented about sixteen hours in the last fourteen days. That could be a good candidate to move to this job, rather than going and renting a machine and spending that money. So, these are just some of the reports you can look at inside of telematics. This data is also fed down, especially to three sixty, to really build a strong, robust set of data that can be used for cost per hour over the life of equipment, so you can know on my D5 dozers, on my CAT D5 dozers, generally I see this cost per hour, but on this one I'm seeing a higher cost or lower cost. What can I do differently to make sure I'm getting the most out of my equipment? And then, all this data also, in a transition over to Michaela here, is going to be working with insights to give you a higher level of reporting. So I'll pass it off to Michaela to kind of talk about that. Yeah, so a lot of what Reed and Chris have shown are reporting options that are available within the application that you're working in. We also have a tool called Insights, which is free for our customers to use. So long as you have an HCSS subscription to any of our product applications, you also have Insights out of the box. So what is insights? This is what we're gonna cover, what it is, what's inside it, what you can find, who we built it for, what it can do, and then how you can get access to it if you don't already. So what is Insights? Insights is a reporting solution built on top of Power BI. So Power BI is Microsoft's reporting dashboard reporting solution. So Microsoft Word is their document solution. Excel is their spreadsheet solution. Power BI would be their reporting solution. It had recently been in beta. We've now launched with over a thousand customers to help our our customers make better decisions and build reports. As I mentioned previously, as long as you have an active HCSS subscription, you have access to insights at no cost. One thing that's really great about this is that it's really quick. So we're not waiting and sitting watching it spin. There's not a lot of there's no loading when applying different slicers and filters. You can see real time data, and data update instantly inside your reports using different filters on the different reports. For those of you who might be a little bit more savvy with Power BI, we do have the ability for you to be able to create custom reports across our HCSS products. And so there is Equipment three sixty data in here. There is HeavyJob data, safety data. There's some form data, HeavyBid data, pre con data as well with more coming every couple of months, more products being added. So what you could actually see in here that is a little different from what Reed showed or what Chris showed is we have equipment utilization reports. We've got reports related to your shop and shop summaries, how long equipment is sitting idle, or how long it's sitting in the shop, or you can look at different reports by different foremen or by different crews. Another thing you can do too with insights is that you can subscribe and schedule different reports. So if you have a Monday stand up meeting or a regular safety meeting and you'd like to send that out to the group beforehand so you guys can pull up and look at the metrics in the meeting, you can choose different recipients for those emails and these reports to go to, and it'll be sent right from their email on a specific schedule or whatever cadence and frequency you select. Additionally, if you want to slideshow report, you can see in the picture there, there's a slideshow button. So if you don't want it to email, you just want to pull it up right there, it's in a presentation mode, so it looks similar to like a slide decker or PowerPoint. And so you can show off and you can live edit the report even though it looks as if it's in slideshow mode. Also, one thing that comes free with insights is this should say over ninety at this point because we have over ninety canned reports ready to use that are can be customized to your specific business. These are ones that over a thousand customers are using. So the folks down the road from you that are using HCSS have access to these same reports that you do, but you're able to customize. You're able to add your own logos. You're able to see the data that only you want to see. And if if you end up running into, like, the limitations of your own expertise, we also have a team that can help write those custom reports for you. Data visualizations, you get the same thing that you would find in a tool like Power BI or Tableau or Domo. All of them interactive with the ability to help you tell better stories about your business, drill down, explore data live while you're presenting, all without having to switch to different applications. And this is mobile friendly. So you can send updates. You can send reports to the field on your phone in real time. All of these visualizations too have the ability to do custom calculations inside the visualization. So at HCSS, we have a couple of different ways pulling data out about your jobs, about your projects, about your equipment. HCSS Insights is probably our very entry level, like I said, our free solution out of the box that delivers real time insights without additional configuration on your end. We also have direct access and our APIs, but insights is the one that we've built so that you can cross product report on your HCSS product suite like HeavyBid, HeavyJob, E360 Safety, and that we've done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. So if you don't really know how to get started with recording, this is exactly where you get started. We have calculated fields, custom cal visual calculations that we've recently added, over ninety prebuilt reports on your equipment utilization, cost management, productivity, safety meetings, risk and compliance, reports that we update on an hourly basis, reports that we update in real time, and reports that we run on a daily cycle as well, all with the ability to report from multiple HCSS products, not just within a single application at a time. Here's over the the here's some examples of some of the reports that are available. So, like you see with E360, we've got work orders, hours, cost by equipment, item code, work order summaries, equipment run time, etcetera, etcetera. Also, on the operation side of things, we've got labor hours report, cost code summary report, daily field reports, very popular with many of our customers. And so if you're curious about learning more about these or wanting to drill into these, I think my contact info is on the slides later on. Just feel free to reach out to me, and I'd be happy to set you up with a team member or myself, and we can walk you through any of these reports that you're curious about. Now how to get Insights. If you're paying attention and would like to go and add this right now, feel free to take photo, screenshot, whatever is helpful for you. I would like to see my Insights number of signups jump up after this webinar. And if it doesn't, I'm going to assume you guys already have it. So here's how to add Insights. If you're a company admin, you need to go into HCSS credentials. And by you get there by going to www.hcssapps.com homepage, and then you'll see users and subscriptions. That's HCSS Credentials. If you click that, you'll be taken into HCSS Credentials, and then there'll be a tab on the left hand nav that'll say groups. Click on that. Underneath groups, there'll there'll be a a little icon that says HCSS Insights. Click on that and add it. Then you wait up to five minutes. Your company's dataset will provision to Insights. And then once you log in, you'll have to just go and add the reports that you want. And before I move over to that, are there any questions in the chat that we might be able to take around insights or anything that Reed or Chris have also said? That wraps it up for me on just tooling and reporting that is available to you. Thanks, Michaela. Yeah. We one question come in from Callum about Resource Planner, but this is a great time if you do have questions for me, for Chris, or Michaela. Please go ahead and you can enter them in the Q and A section now. As Michaela mentioned, our names and email addresses are also here. So if you do have questions you don't wanna put in the q and a, feel free to reach out to us at any time for more information as well. With that said, we did have a question from Callum. Does Resource Planner share information with HeavyJob and HeavyBid? I would say, sort of. It does it does share information with HeavyBid or with HeavyJob. Sorry. The way that works today, it it is if you are scheduling a crew using Resource Planner, there is a way for that crew information to be sent in the HCSS field app to the foreman out in the field. So we added a new option on the time card for for customers that have heavy that that have Resource Planner, you can pull in your crew from the schedule. And so that comes straight from Resource Planner. So you A lot of times, foremen might be manually selecting their crew if it's a new crew they're working with, or they'll copy it from the previous time card. One thing they can do is just pull in from pull in from the schedule and it will pull it in straight from what's scheduled in Resource Planner, both crew and equipment. So we do have that integration set up with HeavyJob. We don't have any current integrations set up with HeavyBid. I know the the team is looking at specifically how we might create some integrations, whether that's with preconstruction or our new web version of HeavyBid that that we just launched a few weeks ago. I team is is looking at building new integrations. So this is not a a forever thing, but for now, it's really just HeavyJob that we have that integration with. And then the next thing, a little preview, you can go on our on our roadmap site. We are building a integration with MyField. So, you have MyField, which is our our our application that is for for your workforce for them to for clock in, clock out, and inspections. Soon, we will be able to notify users in MyField on their assignment for the day. So we already have text message notification. We're building out that MyField integration that should be available in the next few months. So that's coming up as well. Let's see. I don't see any additional questions coming in right now. But, again, you have our email addresses here. Oh, we had something come up. Is it possible to set up specific dates when we're creating reports and Insights? That's for Michaela. Yes, Rachel. It is. So you can select the frequency or the date that you'd like if you want to get the report just one time, or if you want it every Monday, if you want it every day, if you want it twice a day. You can set up the frequency and dates, absolutely. Alright. I think we got through our questions. Oh, no. There's another question. Another question regarding the way HCSS communicates with Sage. Is there someone I can call to discuss? Yes. I or, Michaela, you wanna take this one? Yeah. That's me too. Absolutely. Just shoot me an email right there, and we'll talk directly. One of the teams that I get to work with every day and then I get to manage is our our integrations team that works directly with Sage. So, absolutely, I can help you with that. Yeah. Reach out to Michaela. I'll also say we have an excellent support team here at HCSS. It's open twenty four seven, three sixty five. So if you reach out to Michaela on this one, but you can always reach out to our support team as well. That might just get routed to Michaela. But again, feel free to reach out to our support as well. Alright. We have a question. Can you reshare the slide that shows how to turn on insights? It looks like you moved that. Thank you, Michaela. Yes. So is there anything you want to talk through here as a reminder, Michaela? If you do encounter any issues with this, it's possible you might not be a company admin. But as Reed said, we have an excellent support team who can help you get this set up in just a couple of minutes. So if you have any questions, feel free to call our support, and we'll get that done for you. Rachel has a question as well on if there's training to assist with all the filters and insights. Yes. Our academy has excellent resources on how to get started with insights. If you've never worked with Power BI before or if it's been a little while or if you just want a refresher as you're getting trained up on insights, go visit the academy. But again, if there's specific filters or things you're wondering why the functionality is a little different or what it can possibly do, feel free to reach out to me. I have an excellent team that would be able to help you out. Excellent. Thank you, Michaela. I think that is all the questions we have. Again, feel free to reach out to any of us. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. We really look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for spending this time with us.