Customer Success Story: Oregon Aerial Construction

Oregon Aerial Construction is a fast-growing company that specializes in utility service maintenance, telecommunications service, and outside plant construction and maintenance.

Servicing many of the largest telecommunication and utility service providers in the United States, the company covers a very large area, including the greater Portland metropolitan district to the coast of Oregon and into the Southwest region of Washington State.

The Challenge

Lack of a Global Consolidated View Across Schedules

Covering a very large service area for its construction and maintenance service operations, Oregon Aerial was challenged by a lack of a global, consolidated view across work orders and scheduled crews.

Due to the sheer volume of jobs, and the significantly large service area, opportunities were slipping through the cracks. It was crucial for operations and business management to be able to see the full footprint of job locations in order to effectively schedule service work. Paper-based processes compounded an already complex balance of coordination across work assignments, crews and service areas.

With field service operations that include utility service maintenance and telecommunication construction, Oregon Aerial needed the ability to visually see and prioritize all the jobs on a map, schedule the right crew with the right skills, and document the work completed in a work order form. This process was crucial and had to be followed before a customer could be invoiced. Reducing the time to realize revenue was a key goal for the business.

In general, Oregon Aerial was lacking a cohesive solution to help manage its end-to-end field service operations. The company sought all-in-one field service management software to solve take control of scheduling work assignments, eliminate paper-based processes, reduce time to revenue, and improve the customer experience.

The Solution

All-in-one Field Service Automation to Reduce Inefficiencies and Realize Revenue Faster

Oregon Aerial’s executive management team spent considerable time conducting due diligence to find the right software to meet its needs, including evaluating several other vendors. As the only solution that met its stringent requirements, Field Squared was chosen as the digital backbone to streamline the company’s field service operations.

STREAMLINE SCHEDULING AND DISPATCH

A few years ago, with only a few crews and completely paper-based processes, Oregon Aerial would schedule and assign roughly 10 to 15 jobs per week, sometimes as many as 25.

By the time the company embarked on evaluating a solution, the business had grown to the point operations management may schedule as many as 500 to 600 jobs per week using the same paper processes. “It was evident the paper system we were using, comprised of racks and racks of folders with addresses and cities on them, was not scaling with our growing business,” stated Chris Barley, Co-Owner and President at Oregon Aerial. “To put it lightly, it was overwhelming.”

Field Squared scheduling and dispatch capabilities helped Oregon Aerial regain control of crew schedules. By further applying skill tags, Oregon Aerial ensures the right crew to the right job, which has helped to increase first time fix rate.

Field Squared helped us streamline our once chaotic process to schedule work assignments,” said Barley. “The best part is we can visually see the jobs on a map. If there is a priority job that must be completed, we take advantage of the map-based view to schedule additional work nearby. With Field Squared’s scheduling capabilities, Oregon Aerial has not only increased efficiency, but revenue per day.”

Being able to filter specific customer locations on a map, Oregon Aerial can quickly see where it is heavy or lean on workload, further improving resource planning and allocation. With Field Squared, nothing slips through the cracks anymore.

REALIZE REVENUE FASTER

The nature of service work Oregon Aerial conducts for utility companies specifically, brought with it a complicated billing structure no other field service management software provider could solve.

Working for many different telecommunications and utility customers, Oregon Aerial maintains each customer as a unit-based contract where unit prices differ based on the myriad of service or maintenance tasks the company is contracted to perform.

With each contract, there are different task identifier numbers, codes and pricing, and the company manages at least half-a-dozen contracts. Before Field Squared, everything associated with customer contracts was managed on paper.When it came to incorporating Oregon Aerial’s billing codes—a complex web of different types of customers that comprised different contracts and service rates, pricing and task identifier numbers and codes—Field Squared eliminated the complexity to seamlessly incorporate the information into work assignments.

We were failing at managing complex customer contracts and pricing on paper. To try to separate everything became exceptionally complicated,” said Barley. “Field Squared was the only software that allowed us to effortlessly manage our book of customers.”

Field Squared also enabled Oregon Aerial to realize revenue faster, by applying automation.

The typical utility customer can take 30 to 60 days to pay on invoices. What that means for Oregon Aerial is how long it takes to invoice is on the critical path to receiving payment.

“The Field Squared Mobile App significantly increased efficiency for our crews in the field, particularly when it came to invoicing customers after work was completed,” stated Barley. “When a crew finishes a job, we can be invoicing the customer in minutes, because all the information is in Field Squared. Management can quickly review the job, approve it for billing and an automated notification is sent to our admins to invoice the customer in a matter of minutes.

From the time a job is received and completed, the time it is invoiced is when the clock starts for Oregon Aerial to realize revenue on the service work.

“The old process took us days, sometimes weeks to invoice a customer. Field Squared has helped us get paid faster by eliminating the inefficiencies,” said Barley.

UP-TO-THE-MINUTE DOCUMENTATION FOR EMERGENCY WORK ORDERS

The utilities and telecommunications industries face unique challenges. Inclement weather as well as aging infrastructure can impact the urgency for service maintenance remediation.

Emergency maintenance work is a common occurrence for Oregon Aerial, and the company responds to such situations on a fairly regular basis. From downed poles, downed lines, or storm damages, the business has its hands full. Remedying emergency situations is one of the reasons the company chose Field Squared software.

In Field Squared, the Oregon Aerial team can create an emergency job, attaching photos of the site or any other documentation related to the emergency directly on the work order. At a moment’s notice, operations can dispatch the nearest crew to job.

“When that crew picks up the work order, they immediately already have all the information needed to complete the work. Field Squared truly is critically important software for our business,” exclaimed Barley.

IMPORT AND EXPORT ESSENTIAL DATA

Oregon Aerial’s business model includes accepting work orders from customers that are provided to operations management in the format of a spreadsheet. With hundreds of work orders, Oregon Aerial required a quick and easy way to import jobs anytime they needed to.

Before Field Squared, when Oregon Aerial operations received a spreadsheet of jobs from the customer, the team sorted by service areas and created paper printouts for the field crews who would fill out the work orders by hand. When the work was completed, the crews brought the paperwork back into the office where the admins would re-type the data back into the spreadsheet.

Double data entry caused significant delays while greatly impacting the integrity of data accuracy.

“It was an extremely tedious, time consuming process,” recalled Barley. “With Field Squared, we can easily import a spreadsheet containing hundreds of work orders—and all associated information. The jobs are dropped right on a map to schedule the crews.”

Moreover, Field Squared Mobile Smart Forms provide crews with an intuitive solution to capture work order information from their mobile device. “Not only has our data quality greatly improved, but efficiency has increased exponentially since we started using Field Squared.”

The Results

Increased Operational Efficiency and an Improved Customer Experience

Oregon Aerial has reaped tremendous business value, as well as an unanticipated benefit, since the company implemented Field Squared.

One standout result for Oregon Aerial is how the business has improved the customer experience through transparency of operations. Utilizing read-only access, Oregon Aerial provides its customers with access to Field Squared. The customer can easily look up a job and see the status, who is assigned, when it is scheduled, and if it has been invoiced.

“All of the customers we have given access to so far are thrilled when they go into Field Squared and see what we are doing. Our customers trust in us to do the right thing and this added layer of transparency reinforces our commitment to a stellar customer experience every time,” expressed Barley.

Since implementing Field Squared, Oregon Aerial quickly realized a return on their investment. A few key results the company has realized include:

•Eliminated 95% of paperwork – The company burned through reams and reams of paper before Field Squared.
•30% increase in field service efficiency on one customer account alone.
•Completion of twice as many jobs for one of its largest customers.
•Reduced overhead for the purchasing and storage of paperwork (i.e., printer toner, folders, backups, notes, filing cabinets).

One unanticipated benefit Oregon Aerial experienced by using Field Squared had to do with a recent change in a large customer contract. The customer has worked with Oregon Aerial for more than 10 years, but the customer made a new change to the contract that required “after” photos of work being completed.

“I was unaware this change was happening, but luckily we had Field Squared,” articulated Barley. “When the customer informed us of this change, I knew we could easily meet the requirement because we have Field Squared.”

Barley pointed out that other contractors in the field were scrambling. In fact, he added they are still scrambling. “I could not imagine attempting to meet this new customer requirement without Field Squared.”

He went on to say that many, many hours would have been added to administrative processes if the company did not have Field Squared.

Oregon Aerial is growing, but Field Squared will continue to grow with the business.

Until Field Squared, we were holding ourselves back from growth, because we did not have the software in place that could enable us to handle a greater volume of work. Now, the sky’s the limit with Field Squared,” exclaimed Barley.