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D.C. Taylor Co. is a very successful roofing contractor with headquarters in Iowa and offices
as widely dispersed as the east and west coast. In the past year, they have decided to build up
the service portion of their business as a way to help get more of the larger contracts that are
their bread and butter. They asked Evan to evaluate their IT infrastructure to see how best to
bring their handling of service calls up to speed.
Evan spent time with service call administrators and executives to determine what the current process was
and how it should be optimized. He made several process recommendations, including who should set service calls up in the accounting
system and when, and situations in which the service information would never make it into the customer file. This last point
was very important, because the service history in the customer file was the information that salespeople needed to
turn service customers into re-roofing customers.
Evan went on to recommend four different manual steps that should be automated, and further investigation
into what should happen when a service manager took the service call instead of a salesperson.
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FO Day is a third generation family owned company in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
They are primarily a heavy highway contractor, but have also branched out into a couple of related
areas. After spending time with some of the management team as well as working with other members of
the staff, Evan came up with three areas for FO Day to focus on:
FO Day is blessed with loyal and lifelong employees. However, this has resulted in a typical problem.
There are certain key employees that FO Day has become over-reliant on, and they are all
employees who are very near retirement age. Evan observed the need to start
forming back up plans for these very important individuals, and offered three different
ways of doing this, including pros and cons for each.
The growth that FO Day has experienced over it's history has led to another problem. There
are two different ways that FO Day has managed jobs -- Each with it's own reporting standards
and management practices. Loosely speaking, these were the "large" and "small" jobs. However
the definition of which is which has blurred to the point that there are hundred thousand dollar
plus jobs that are being administrated as if they were a residential paving job. Evan was
able to show that there is likely to be thousands of dollars being left on the table through large
jobs being treated as small jobs. He went on to specifically recommend how these jobs should be
handled in the accounting system.
Another side effect of FO Day's growth is expansion into areas that aren't adequately served
by the technical infrastructure put in place for it's historical excavation and paving activities.
In both of these types of work, material cost either isn't a factor (excavation), or there is a single
type of material that is very well controlled (asphalt). However, in the case of bridge construction and
underground utilities, material cost is a more significant factor, yet there were no inventory
controls in place for these expensive materials.
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