Summary
Managing 811 ticket renewals was a resource-intensive endeavor at McGuire and Hester, a heavy civil, site work and landscape contractor based in California. Integrating 811spotter’s purpose-built automated system into daily operations empowered the company to focus more time and resources on its core business.
“Knowing that our tickets are automated through 811spotter gives us immense peace of mind, enabling us to shift our time and focus to the productivity and safety of our work crews.”
Rene Acosta
Safety Administrator, McGuire and Hester
Challenge
As a safety administrator, Rene Acosta oversees the worker safety at McGuire and Hester; his primary responsibilities include managing compliance, conducting site audits and training crews on safety protocols.
“The main goal is the safety and protection of our staff,” says Acosta. “My job is to make sure every employee has the necessary tools and certifications to operate safely and complete projects on time and within budget.”
A critical part of Acosta’s role is managing the 811 ticketing process, a responsibility he’s shouldered for several years at McGuire and Hester. Today, it’s an efficient process automated by 811spotter. But this wasn’t always the case, as Acosta remembers all too well. Before implementing 811spotter, he and his team manually tracked tickets through spreadsheets, spending hours per day on data entry and renewals.
“If we missed a renewal, it could cost thousands of dollars in delays,” recalls Acosta. “The manual process was a tremendous weight on my shoulders.”
It was not a burden that could be easily shared. The manual 811 ticket process and all the details therein made knowledge transfer and training a challenge, which meant very few employees could cover for Acosta if he was sick or taking time off. A short vacation had to be planned weeks in advance, requiring Acosta to create a policy and map out details by keystroke, line by line, in order to temporarily hand over the system. This presented even more safety issues.
Solution
Acosta embraces technology and sees a growing role for it in the construction industry.
“Better technology means less labor cost, less downtime, and more importantly, less injuries,” says Acosta.
Acosta wondered if there was something innovative out there for his 811-ticketing headache. He found out about 811spotter as a system that could streamline the 811-ticketing process specific to contractors. Acosta wanted to take it for a test drive.
“When I learned how easy it was, and once we enrolled and got all the tickets over to 811spotter, the migration was seamless,” recalls Acosta. “Once we were on 811spotter, we never looked back.”
Outcome
The process of migrating McGuire and Hester 811 tickets took about a week. Now, all tickets flow automatically into 811spotter – regardless of who creates them – and are quickly organized by job. Acosta can export tickets into Excel for easy communication to the field or any other stakeholders.
Today, McGuire and Hester’s 811 ticket process is a well oiled machine that:
- Averages 200 monthly tickets managed by 811spotter
- Frees up time to focus on ensuring 100% compliance with safety and damage prevention
- Enables the 811 process custodian to take vacation time having to meticulously plan a temporary handover to another employee
With 811spotter’s automated ticket management platform, McGuire and Hester enjoys exponential benefits. Untold hours of manual data entry, inevitable human errors with costly consequences, missed communications that risk safety – these are no longer burdens to the organization. 811spotter does all the heavy lifting, automatically renewing tickets and updating stakeholders through notifications. For the McGuire and Hester team, this means more time to focus on the business of building and maintaining worker safety.
Concludes Acosta, “Knowing that renewals are automatically taken care of gives us peace of mind and shifts the focus entirely to interacting with our work crews and ensuring their safety.”
