Our guys are not going to use an app. Is that a dealbreaker?
Only if the app is built for an office. What works out here is a phone page with four fields and a camera button, filled in standing beside the machine, with no login to remember and no training class. If a system needs a tutorial, it will not be used and we will have wasted your money. We design for a man with one glove off.
How much work are we actually losing to paperwork?
We can usually tell you within a week of looking. In this kind of business the two big numbers are the gap between finishing a job and sending the bill, and the value of tickets that never turned into an invoice at all. Owners are routinely wrong about both, generally in the same direction. We measure them before we quote anything, so you can decide with a real figure in front of you.
We hire more people in spring and lay off in winter. Does a system make sense with that turnover?
It makes onboarding faster, which is where seasonal crews cost you. Getting a new operator's licences, medical card and inductions into one place on day one takes ten minutes instead of a half day, and next March when three of them come back the file is still there. Winter is also when we prefer to build here, because nobody can train in June.
If a line gets hit, what does this actually give us?
A record. What was called in, on what date, what came back, what was marked, what the conditions were, and who dispatched the crew knowing that. We do not claim software prevents a strike — an operator and a locate do that. What it does is make sure the answer to the question afterwards is a file rather than four people's recollection.
Our records go back years and half of them are on paper in the shop. What happens to those?
We take what is useful going forward and leave the rest alone. There is rarely a case for keying in a decade of old tickets. Customers, rates, equipment and current qualification documents are worth carrying over; historic job files usually stay in the cabinet. Whatever does go in stays yours, exportable in a standard format, and we will put that in writing before you pay anything.
We already use accounting software and a dispatch whiteboard. What changes?
The whiteboard, mostly. Accounting stays where it is — we feed it rather than replace it. The change is that the ticket, the photographs, the driver status and the customer rate live together, so billing is a run rather than a reconstruction. If it turns out your accounting package already has a field module you never turned on, we will tell you and you can save the money.
Is there a risk the system starts emailing our customers on its own?
No, because it has no permission to. Anything outbound — a quote, an invoice, a chaser — waits behind our review gate, SolaceSentry, for one of your people to press send. Drafting happens by itself; sending does not. Where a customer is often somebody you will run into at the elevator on a Saturday, that difference is worth the two seconds it costs.
Where does AI come into a hauling and excavating business?
Reading a scrawled ticket into line items and matching a locate response back to the right job are AI doing what it is good at. Scheduling, pricing and compliance status are ordinary software, and should be, because you want them to behave the same way every time. When a plain database answers the question, that is what we build, and it costs you less.