Dave Hurley has served in Executive roles with several leading contractors including , , , and . His team has worked on large high profile projects ranging from $20M to $400M. With over 30 years of construction experience, Dave is adept in proposal development, estimating, preconstruction, project management and field operations.
Dave implemented eSUB in his companies to organize bigger project, save documentation, and improve field productivity. An eSUB user for many years, Dave participated in a webinar with our Director of Account Management Justin Wetherby to share the secrets of productivity and profitability in construction.
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The reason I liked eSUB so much when I used it is that the daily report gives you insight to the field and what鈥檚 going on, what鈥檚 not going on, changes, and delays. Also if you use the daily report as a time function, then it gives you a lot of insight of how you鈥檙e doing. If there鈥檚 anything within eSUB for my money, it鈥檚 the daily report that generates whether you鈥檙e gonna make money or lose money on a job.
Some of the things that it tracks is the labor and equipment. Those are the hardest activities to control on a job site and just so happen to be the most expensive. Managing both of those effectively, by watching the man-hours, the cost of equipment, it allows you to make good decisions. So if you鈥檙e waiting at the end of the month to try to figure out what your cost is, you鈥檙e letting history go by you because you can鈥檛 change history. I鈥檒l always say that you have to be proactive and active in a project to make it successful so the daily log to me is like your window into the daily workings of the field.
It鈥檚 a great thing to do. On the daily report, you have comments and internal comments. You can snap off the internal comments and send them that daily report. If you have delay number one is this, delay number 2 is this, and you try getting updated drawings to build this section, continue to fill that in and never get rid of that stuff until each one of those things are done.
The nice thing about the daily logs in eSUB is that you can copy yesterday鈥檚 daily log and make it today鈥檚 and either erase or add thanks to it to make it simpler instead of trying to write all that stuff out again. Getting that emailed off every day is great because you鈥檙e actually notifying them, per your contract agreement that within 48 hours you鈥檙e going to tell them about a problem. They鈥檙e also going to be a little bit more proactive because you鈥檙e being proactive about getting them the information and they鈥檒l respect you for that, more than the next up that鈥檚 not doing it.
A lot of companies have different places where information is being generated and we call those silos. You鈥檙e doing some middles in one place, RFIs on word, change orders in Excel, payroll is being performed on paper sheets or another separate software, but using eSUB, it pulls everything together in one place. The information is at your fingertips and because the modules work together, you could just be a better decision maker with all that information at your fingertips.
It鈥檚 a really strong feature with eSUB. As you know, everybody has Outlook. They have all their jobs, and they try to drag all their emails to each job incase they ever have to go back and reference something. Well here鈥檚 the repository where everything should be because everybody鈥檚 got 10,000 emails in their outlook box that they can鈥檛 get rid of because it鈥檚 history you never want to lose and you always want to answer the problem that may come up.
Everything goes in here, then you never have to worry about it. It鈥檚 one place that you can always look at all the emails and the emails give timeline of the job. Do the daily logs so anytime anything starts going wrong, you could always go back to these things. You create a timeline, put everything together, and show how the job went, it鈥檚 just a great history maker.
I used a lot of the letter of intent to figure out if I would sub a portion of the job out. I also always use the soft delay email. I wasn鈥檛 getting any response on the RFI so what these correspondents do is give you another level. If you send an email and you don鈥檛 get a response, you send it again. The next thing that you can do if you鈥檙e still not getting any responses is make phone calls. Then you need to go to a letter and document the date.
These things are really becoming a problem and I鈥檓 doing this work without direction. There鈥檚 just a host of things here that give you a custom, I call them Dunning letters that you can write really quick and get out the door so you don鈥檛 need to sit down for two or three hours to draft anything. You just type up a quick sentence and it becomes a letter and it goes out.
鈥淚f there鈥檚 anything you get out of this, just remember these three things. At the end of the day, the one with the best documentation wins. eSUB collects all that together and helps you organize yourself. The information is accessible in one place so you can be more efficient and it just makes your job so much easier. Looking at things and being able to develop them, send and receive them, helps you make good decisions.
The third, which I think is the most important thing is that the field is where the money is won or lost. When it鈥檚 lost, you can鈥檛 review, you can鈥檛 rewrite history so if you know information coming from the field, you can react and you can be proactive to change the course of the job. That鈥檚 what we鈥檙e trying to do and when you have information at your fingertips, you can make good decisions.鈥�
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