Case Study
Real Estate & Construction | Field Force | Small/Medium Business Case Study
Company: Thompson Grading is a mid-sized land
grading contractor for commercial building projects.
Industry: Real Estate/Construction
Region: Americas
Company Size: Small-Medium Enterprise
Mobile Solution: BlackBerry Internet Solution
Application Type: Business Intelligence, Workflows
and Approvals (ERP)
BlackBerry Partner Application: Comet Tracker™
from ActSoft™ Inc.
Goals: Develop an accurate way to record employee hours worked
and to receive daily timesheets without having crew leaders physically
transporting the paperwork to the office.
Solution: Using BlackBerry® devices equipped with the BlackBerry
Internet Solution™, Comet Tracker and Bluetooth® barcode scanners,
crew leaders scan each employee’s ID to clock their time on the job.
GPS location tracking validates exact times and locations and pushes
the data to back office payroll systems.
Results:•Reduced overtime by $1,500 to $3,000/month
∑
•Increased productivity of crew leaders by 20 hours/month
∑
•Streamlined job administration
∑
•Improved employee communications
Thompson
G ra d i n g
“Anyone in the construction industry is going
to have similar challenges. BlackBerry and
Comet Tracker was the best solution for ensuring
our crew leaders stay productive.”
Shanna Fields
CFO | Thompson Grading
Situation:
Solution:
Thompson Grading relies on its crew leaders to track the
hours worked by each employee and deliver timesheets
to head office for payroll and customer billing.
Enter BlackBerry wireless devices. Thompson Grading
gained push email, which means employees receive their email
without effort. Messages are delivered automatically to the
BlackBerry device without having to do anything to request
them. With BlackBerry devices, Thompson Grading now had
phone, email and calendar included in a convenient, all-in-one
package. It also gained the capacity to easily deploy thirdparty software that would help with its time-tracking needs.
The challenge? Job sites are often in remote locations,
hours away from the office, without fax machines or office
facilities, and require long commutes. This was not a good
use of people’s time and was costing the company money.
There was also no way to accurately track if hours posted
were actual hours worked – to help keep overtime in check
and jobs on track.
“It’s not cost-efficient for us to leave a job unmanned
while a crew leader is driving timesheets to us,” says
Shanna Fields. “That’s unproductive time for them,
plus with rising gas costs, it just doesn’t make sense.”
Other communications, such as employee memos and
purchase orders, had to be picked up by crew leaders.
And Thompson Grading had to depend on people
remembering to communicate the memos during a
harried day on a job site. As a result, many details
fell between the cracks or got lost in transit.
“Before anyone actually had the BlackBerry devices in their
hands, we got some moans and complaints,” says Fields.
“But now it’s all quiet. Crew leaders love BlackBerry
because it’s easy to use and saves them a lot of effort.”
BlackBerry meets GPS tracking software. Thompson
Grading has experienced newfound savings and believes
much of the reason is Comet Tracker, a GPS locationbased tracking software for BlackBerry that is used to
clock employees. The solution tracks employee time on
the job for more accurate customer billing. Actsoft Inc.,
the maker of Comet Tracker, adapted its software so that
it could read barcodes scanned into a BlackBerry device
from a peripheral Bluetooth scanner.
Crew leaders each have a BlackBerry device equipped with
a Bluetooth barcode scanner. As each employee arrives
at a job, they present their ID barcode. The employee’s
ID, and the job information the crew leader has on a
clipboard, is scanned with the barcode scanner into the
BlackBerry device so Comet Tracker can read it. Once
GeoStamped – or tracked by latitude, longitude and time
– the data is pushed back to Thompson Grading for
payroll and billing.
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Value to Organization:
Partner Profile
Company: ActSoft Inc.
Product: Comet Tracker
Activity
Before
After: with BlackBerry and Comet Tracker
Overtime
Limited ability to predict job overruns
Reduced overtime by
$1,500 to $3,000/month
Time Sheet Management
Crew leaders drive to head office to deliver
timesheets
Wireless timesheet management
saves 20 hours/month
Communication
Phone calls to ask for translated phrases cause
delays on the job
Faster response times via email
keep jobs running smoothly
Application Type: Field Force Solution
Services:
• Strategic development
• Customized
• Ongoing support and development
Business Value:
“ActSoft worked with us to connect the barcode
scanning aspect. I don’t know many other companies
who would have provided that all-around service –
a great solution plus exceptional customer
service. We had an idea, and they worked with
us to make it a reality.”
Shanna Fields
CFO | Thompson Grading
“We went with barcode scanning and BlackBerry because
it’s simple and one step – everything changes daily in
our business and we didn’t want to have people keying
in lots of information,” says Fields. “Also, a lot of the
solutions we looked at meant every person had to have
a device to log in their time. Comet Tracker was more
practical for us to hand out because we know our crew
leaders remain more constant than our workforce.”
Accurate data equals significant savings. With a
GeoStamp that validates time and location, Thompson
Grading takes the guesswork out of job management.
Knowing the exact hours worked per job has helped
it reduce its overtime by $1,500 to $3,000/month.
For more information, visit www.actsoft.com
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By taking away the need to ferry time sheets back
and forth, it estimates that its crew leaders also gain
20 hours/month in productivity. Time that is better
spent managing the details of a job by staying onsite.
The unexpected extras. Since many of the crew only
speak Spanish, crew leaders often need to communicate
in Spanish – which used to require phone calls to the
office for help with translations. With push email, Fields
now can quickly search Internet translation services and
send out translated job information to help keep things
running smoothly on the job site.
Results:
Using the attachment reading features on BlackBerry, the
company also sends Microsoft® Word and PDF documents
to its crew leaders. Thompson Grading finds the feature
helps keep communications flowing from office memos
to purchase orders and change orders.
“BlackBerry is so easy to implement and build on.
Our next step is to adopt a solution that helps
us manage our equipment and track repairs – and
I know BlackBerry is going to be the way we go.”
Shanna Fields
CFO | Thompson Grading
“When a customer requests extra work, not covered by
our original specifications, crew leaders can send us the
details. We hear from the job site about the extra hours
and equipment that’s required. With BlackBerry, we
automatically have a record of the change order and the
new job costing. So there are no disputes down the line.”
• Reduced overtime: Savings of $1,500 to $3,000/
month in overtime contribute to the company’s health
and profitability.
• Increased productivity: Crew leaders redirect
20 hours/month that were once used to transport
time sheets to the office into work that contributes
to job management.
• Better administrative management: Sharing documents
keeps track of the details that affect job costing and
customer billing.
• Improved communications: Easily emailing the office
for translation services solves communications barriers
on the spot.
For more information on BlackBerry solutions,
visit www.blackberry.com/go/success
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