When Geauga Mechanical, a third-generation mechanical contractor serving Northeastern Ohio needed a better application to track field time that would also easily work with their accounting and design systems, they began looking at their options.

“Nothing did all of the things we were looking for,” recalls Craig Berman, CEO of Geauga Mechanical, which specializes in design/build construction of energy-efficient mechanical systems. The company used a sophisticated formula for assessing job data but lacked a system for collecting time sheets and allocating hours in the field to specific job codes and phases. This put them at risk of underestimating how much time was required for each task.

“When we saw eSUB, we realized it was a good fit for time reporting, but that it could also solve the problem of getting information into Sage without double data entry,” Berman said. “There were a lot of solutions out there that were intriguing, but eSUB did more of the things we needed.”

“There was always a bit of confusion in the field as to task codes. A lot of stuff got dumped into ‘duct installation’ even if it was something else. It was all going into one big bucket.”

Craig Berman, CEO of Geauga Mechanical

Prior to transitioning to eSUB, Geauga’s paper-based system of time reporting required field employees to call in to the office weekly or submit written time sheets that had to be reviewed, approved, and then manually entered into the accounting system. “Our accounting staff was in the office every Monday, calling people in the field,” Berman said. “This took at least two hours of time from people in the field and four hours from accounting. Now it takes only a few minutes,” he added. “eSUB also saves me time approving time cards. If I’m out, I can quickly review and approve them from my phone.”

The pandemic made an inefficient system even more tedious. It was clunky and left hours reported in a way that made job costing imprecise. “There was always a bit of confusion in the field as to task codes,” Berman said. “A lot of stuff got dumped into ‘duct installation’ even if it was something else. It was all going into one big bucket.”

Switching to eSUB has made labor productivity tracking for Geauga much more precise, like being able to see at-a-glance exactly how much time it took to hang 100 feet of duct work.

After a year into their eSUB transition, the full value of the system came into play for Berman and the rest of the team at Geauga. The wealth of project data available has provided better visibility into productivity and job costing – and doing it in a lot less time.

One of the first jobs using eSUB showed early on in the project that labor costs were trending 15% over estimate. Being new to the software, the project team didn’t yet trust the accuracy of the data. “We got to the end of the job and we were about 15% over. Had we trusted eSUB, we could have done a few things differently to improve the outcome,” according to Berman. Along the way, Berman said eSUB support and the ability to tweak the system to the company’s specific needs has more than exceeded expectations and he says he would not hesitate to recommend it, especially to companies that are already using sophisticated data to track productivity and job costing. That’s important for a company like Geauga whose success is built around strong customer relationships. “Being relationship-based, we can’t afford to get a bad job or do something that is not up to the standards of our customers. We’ve really focused on technology as a way to make our crews more productive and allow them to get work done more efficiently.”

“eSUB is a pretty good indicator, early on, of how we’re doing. We had been using the same formula, but the data we were getting was not that great. Now we can trust that the data is more accurate. With a high level of accuracy, we can see how we are doing on each task.”

Craig Berman, CEO of Geauga Mechanical

Developed exclusively for commercial subcontractors, eSUB Cloud delivers a mobile and cloud-based construction project management platform. Create, store, access, and analyze all your data, documents, and activities from any device or location. eSUB Cloud’s comprehensive platform includes applications for managing submittals, change orders, RFIs, daily reports, field notes, POs, correspondence, timecards and more, while also integrating with accounting, design and drawing management solutions. As such, eSUB serves as an early warning system to prevent jobs from going off track, which reduces profit fade, and instantly find documentation in eSUB helps protect you against free work, mediation, and litigation.

eSUB delivers mobile and cloud-based construction project management software focused on subcontractors. Create, store, and access all your construction documents and project management activities from one central location. Manage paperless projects through a secure cloud login from the office or the field. eSUB’s software suite includes submittals, change orders, RFIs, daily reports, mobile app, email integration, field notes, timecards, and much more.