Neal Electric provides high quality electrical services to clients of various sizes and in various industries. The primary Neal Electric business groups generate over a thousand job estimates per year, many of which become successfully Neal-managed projects. Neal Electric was relying on an Excel and paper-based business workflow for its job estimation and tracking process. FSI was tasked with creating an advanced database-driven software system to replace the manual, Excel-based bid management and tracking process.
Objectives
Neal Electric wanted to eliminate the reliance on multiple Excel spreadsheets to track a job through its complete lifecycle (from bid initiation to project close out). They also wanted to have a robust search capability to find bids satisfying a given criteria and provide comprehensive line-of-business reports on historic and upcoming bids to give insight into and uncover trends in the bidding process. In additional to the above initiatives, Neal Electric also wanted to be able to allow multiple employees to access the system but limit their interactions based on their functional role.
Results
FSI designed, built, and deployed JobTracker, a Web-based, multi-user online bid management and tracking system designed with Neal Electric’s business processes in mind.
JobTracker used a modern web application with an intuitive user interface based on the Microsoft .NET technology stack. The application also was scalable and built on a robust SQL Server-based database backend. FSI also created a special data import tool to import historic bids from Excel into the new system.
JobTracker completely replaced the legacy Excel and paper-form based system used in the bid initiation and tracking process. The new application gave Neal Electric employees fast and easy access to up-to-date bid information from any Web browser. JobTracker also allowed the employees to collaborate during the bidding process by adding and reviewing comments on each bid item as it progressed. Additionally, JobTracker provided a robust set of business analytics reports to give Neal Electric executives enhanced insight into the bid pipeline as well as metrics on past bids (such as win/loss percentages, biggest competitors). The system has been in active use at Neal Electric for several years and has undergone several upgrades and enhancements as new requirements and developments occurred.