If we're going to invest in our people, we're going to invest in our equipment and our facilities, we need to invest in the technology that we use to maintain all of those aspects.
Before using preconstruction, we were an Excel based user. To go back to living in that stone age, it would only slow us down and make us less productive. We really don't have the opportunity or the time to throw a dart at a dartboard when it comes to a per unit price.
The framework that HeavyBid sets up is a big help in staying organized and profitable. It's cut down on the amount of paper that gets shuffled. We've really tried to go digitally in the way we track forms, accident reports, safety, payroll.
When I first started with HEI, hit rate was kind of low. A good stat would be five -six percent hit rate and then six-seven months where our hit rate is fifteen-twenty percent.
The benefit that heavy bid brings is the fact that you can standardize the way you bid and as we bid projects that are similar pipeline, you start to have similar activities that are on pipe projects, whether it be water or sewer, but you you wanna standardize the way you look at it. We bid in we're awarded a project in Bartow County, Georgia, that was a large diameter project. We were able to secure that project by several percent. And it was good because we were able to be very accurate, be very detailed in the complexity of the project.
That repeatable process helps get bids out quicker because we're not trying to recreate the wheel every time we have a project we want to bid.
Been a heavy bid user since two thousand and four. It's in the past twelve months awarded us around sixty eight million worth of work through key components of reporting. Everything is right there at the Insight tool and get three or four jobs at my hands disposal and then sit down at a roundtable with a customer and make that call to get a contract in hand and close a deal. To take fifteen to twenty minutes to print out reports to go to a big closing. We've narrowed that down to maybe ten minutes max. It's really narrowed our time, closed our window and helped us close deals.
From a leadership standpoint, being able to see our data and our people is eye opening because it shares information and it doesn't become hidden between different segments of the company.
If we're capturing accurate data, client begins to get a level of trust in what we're doing and speeds up the approval process and the payment process. Heavy bid and heavy job tie closely together. When I get accurate data and reporting from my guys in the field, it only makes us more efficient and more accurate without throwing a dart at the dart board on bid day.
From the safety standpoint, once they started reporting more and having the ability to take pictures, turn in a safety observation, turn in a near miss, all of a sudden it brought attention to it.
Our EMR has come down over the past three or four years with a more safety focused, culture.
We use it with integrating our safety With an EMR below one, we're sitting at a point eight.
Having HCSS as a partner makes me feel more confident in what we're buying and what we're investing in because it does feel like a partnership and not just I'm purchasing something off the shelf.
Don't hesitate, don't wait, let the numbers speak for themselves.
