About GS Construction
Employee Featured
Alessandro Salvo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Rodney Dennis, Chief Information Officer (CIO)
Sérgio Mendes, Transportation Manager
Headquarters
Atlanta, GA
Construction Type
Pipeline contractor
Assets Tracked
200+ assets
Tenna Users
70+ users
The Challenge
GS Construction was growing rapidly – new people, new equipment, and new processes. Growing pains were starting to become apparent, with all signs pointing to the company needing an equipment management system.
According to GS Construction CEO Alessandro Salvo, the need for an equipment management system was raised when the company lost an important piece of equipment. He explained, “We realized it was left out on a job for three to four months, and I realized that I needed a way of managing and tracking all the pieces of equipment that we were accumulating.”
GS Construction’s CIO Rodney Dennis agreed, but additionally noting that these growing pains were also showing up in the sheer amount manual work being completed on a large scale – an inefficient use of time (and money), specifically around equipment maintenance.
Like many construction companies, GS Construction had no record of maintenance activities outside of what mechanics had been notating on pen and paper. Dennis said, “As you grow, you can’t really use that as an effective way to manage maintenance, because you have to communicate across several departments and several roles throughout the company so everyone can do their job.”
So, GS Construction adopted Tenna as its equipment management solution to help keep track of equipment, maintain accurate maintenance schedules and records, and streamline communication and efficiency across teams. What they got? So much more.
The Tenna Solution
Seamless Implementation & Installation
About Tenna’s implementation process, Dennis said, “For us, the installation experience was very seamless. It didn’t take any longer than had been estimated out the gate, and I can’t say that for a lot of implementation projects that we’ve done.” He continued, “Mechanics were trained on how to install the trackers and how to complete the verification – and it all went seamlessly.”
Scalability
Salvo stated, “I was noticing before Tenna that other software suites that we brought in were hitting a ceiling of scalability with our existing systems. If we wanted to keep growing, we were going to need a much better way to manage the fleets, the projects, the accounting. So, to continue to grow and scale up, we needed to have a system that could scale up with us, and Tenna seemed to be that system. With Tenna, we are seeing scalability.”
Made for the Construction User
Like most construction companies, employee adoption was a concern when evaluating tech options. “People have attachment to doing things the way that they like to do it,” Dennis said. “Tenna has a great approach as far as user experience to get buy in and get users comfortable with the platform.” He states that Tenna’s great user interface and ease of use was one of the reasons he chose to implement Tenna throughout a company of a hundred employees.
Automated Equipment Maintenance
The biggest change in process for GS Construction was its maintenance program and streamlining maintenance requests had one of the biggest impacts on the crew, according to the company’s CEO. Tenna’s maintenance solution has given the company insight into not only what is going on with its equipment fleet but also a
record of what’s happened in the past.
“At a company with this many crews and this much equipment, keeping up with your scheduled maintenance and then just repairs that are constantly coming up has saved the company,” said Salvo.
Additionally, Tenna has helped GS Construction become more efficient in tracking maintenance incidences and the history of each vehicle and machine. Salvo stated, “Tenna really helps with the reliability of keeping things up in the field, because as soon as there’s a problem, the guys in the field can report it and it gets addressed rather than a crisis allowed to linger until the piece of equipment goes down for a long period of time.”
Increasing equipment uptime saves GS Construction money. He continued, “We’re not prevented from making revenue for the day because a piece of equipment is down. Everything’s running, and if something’s got a problem, it can get maintained or swapped out for another piece of equipment in a timely manner so that production continues.”
What’s more, Salvo reports that Tenna’s maintenance solution has increased the confidence of his crews out in the field. He said,
“When they can submit that maintenance request, then see it get handled and fixed right away, they feel like their voices and their concerns are being heard and responded to.”
GS Construction has also seen gains in terms of scalability in their maintenance program. According to its CIO, Tenna has enabled the business to scale the shop and increase their number of mechanics, because the platform enables mechanics to be more self-sufficient and organized. Dennis said, “They can all go do their own things. They can put their work orders in, and it doesn’t require someone to
manage it and issue the work orders.”
He continued, “I don’t know how many times you’ve dealt with mechanics, but they’re not naturally the biggest team players. They’re independent people, taught to fix things on their own. Tenna has helped them work together.” And this has enabled GS Construction to expand its team.
Data-Informed Business Decisions
With Tenna, GS Construction has been able to make smarter equipment decisions by leveraging utilization stats, records of repairs, and more. This has helped the company identify equipment that is proving to cause problems and if it’s nearing the end of its useful life in the company’s fleet, which helps with buy/sell decisions.
GS Construction has been able to leverage Tenna for other critical business decisions. One such example came when the company was considering moving its office to a new location and purchasing new property.
Dennis said, “We looked for data points that would persuade us in one direction or the other. We were looking at where all our employees were, because we didn’t want to have a huge drop-off in employees who were unhappy with the move location. When we stumbled upon the property that we recently acquired, one calculation that we did was looking at our fuel costs and potential fuel savings based on fuel usage data over the last few years.”
The company determined that it would cut its miles (i.e., travel to job sites) by 20 miles per vehicle, per day, in each direction. That’s a total of 40 miles over the entire fleet. Dennis said, “We realized that we’d save over a million dollars in fuel in one year just by moving our office 20 miles closer to our project sites. So that’s what we did.”
Improved Safety with a Construction Equipment Inspection Program
To ensure the safe operation of equipment and regulatory compliance reporting, GS Construction is also utilizing Tenna’s safety and compliance solution. The company recently implemented driver scorecards, has leveraged inspections and even used Tenna’s custom inspection premium feature for its equipment.
Salvo said, “[Tenna’s Driver Scorecard] has helped greatly with reducing traffic incidents and other bad driving incidents.”
The company identified the risky drivers and began rewarding employees with good driving habits. What GS Construction saw as a result was a huge improvement in the performance of risky drivers, just from implementing Tenna’s safety and compliance.
According to Dennis, 20% of GS Construction’s drivers were having issues maintaining a good driver scorecard when the company implemented Tenna. Now? That 20% has drastically improved, and the company is seeing significant decreases in violations across their drivers.
GS Construction also leverages Tenna’s inspections feature to maintain equipment inspection records and accident reports and keep up with certifications and registrations. Prior to Tenna, the company did not have a formal inspection process outside of the DVIR inspection requirements set by the state.
GS Construction was able to roll out inspections across all road vehicles as well as big trucks that required CDLs. Now, the company is in the process of rolling out inspections across all equipment. Dennis reports that this product has given them greater visibility into the condition of the fleet, helped keep the cost of repairs down and helped keep equipment uptime up.
GS Construction even implemented a transportation manager role who leads these inspections. According to Transportation Manager Sergio Mendez, the benefits are all over the place. Mendez is using DVIR inspections in Tenna but also customizing the company’s equipment inspections.
Procore Integration
A value add for GS Construction is Tenna’s integration with Procore. Dennis said, “Procore integration allows us to automate the process of keeping up with how much equipment is being used on a job site and what equipment is on the job site.”
He continued, “If there’s ever a scenario where we are having to go back and recreate a different bill for a client, based off of time and material, this is really useful, because you can go in and see everything that was automatically recorded on the site, and use the daily log tool in Procore with the information being passed from Tenna.”
This previously manual process of writing this information down is now automated, offering massive time savings for GS Construction’s superintendents in the field. Dennis explained, “That information is now automatically captured in Tenna using the geofence and passed to Procore.”
Dennis reports that the time savings from Tenna’s Procore integration has given the team time to go back and recreate bills, recreate scenarios, solve billing issues with clients and more – all based off of data in Tenna.
He concluded, “This data is just extremely robust when you compare us to other contractors in this space. Because of that, we’ve been able to win legal battles and, overall, just have great documentation about what’s going on on the job site every single day.”
The Results
Better Driver Scorecards
Construction Equipment Inspection Program
Fuel Cost Savings
Scales Mechanic Function
Process Time Savings
New Maintenance Program
What does GS Construction like best about working with Tenna?
“I think the fact that it you can tell that Tenna is obviously built for construction by someone with a construction background,” Dennis said. “I think that’s the big piece that separates Tenna from other software providers and other equipment tracking solutions on the market.”
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