CMiC North Mechanical delivers real-time insights anywhere & anytime through enhanced collaboration & remote capabilities.
The Challenge
Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, North Mechanical Contracting (‘NMC’) is a mechanical subcontractor focused on hospitals, food manufacturing and hotels. The company has been in business for 40 years. In the last decade, NMC acquired North Mechanical Services, a service contractor that has grown 100% in the last six years. The construction and services lines of business complement one another: projects range from $30,000 to $30 million. NMC prides itself on being technologically advanced, owning three Trimble robots and their own fabrication shop onsite.
In evaluating their accounting and productivity software, however, they believed that they had fallen behind because they were using a desktop-based ERP system, despite having multiple locations. “We want to be that cutting-edge company and stay there, as a mechanical contractor,” said Michelle Eastman, CFO at North Mechanical. To connect the information between systems, NMC had an employee attend monthly project management meetings and manually synchronize data. What the company wanted—and needed—was collaboration and remote capabilities, neither of which they had with their legacy systems.
Learn why North Mechanical chose CMiC to deliver real-time insights anywhere & anytime.Download this Case StudyThe Solution
“As we worked through the process of reviewing different products, we realized that CMiC Cloud was the only true Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for a company our size, eliminating the need for purchasing and maintaining a hosting server. We wanted all users to have a single point of access. For a company with an outsourced IT group—like NMC, CMiC Cloud was the most logical solution, giving us the outcomes we wanted.” – Michelle Eastman, CFO at North Mechanical
North Mechanical knew that if they wanted to streamline their processes, they needed to ‘move to the cloud.’ Prior to deploying CMiC, NMC had been using StarBuilder for over 20 years. As they grew and expanded their footprint to multiple locations, they realized that software that facilitates collaboration and enables remote capabilities was essential for their future growth.
“As we worked through the process of reviewing different products, we realized that CMiC Cloud was the only true Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for a company our size, eliminating the need for purchasing and maintaining a hosting server. We wanted all users to have a single point of access. For a company with an outsourced IT group—like NMC, CMiC Cloud was the most logical solution, giving us the outcomes we wanted,” added Eastman. “In the end, it came down to Viewpoint and CMiC. In our opinion, however, Viewpoint’s ‘cloud product’ was not compelling as a SaaS o ering because it had lag issues and did not provide the scalability we were seeking.”
More importantly, North Mechanical wanted to differentiate itself from other subcontractors in the minds of general contractors. NMC knew they could achieve this goal by ensuring that all their data were reliable—up-to-date and accurate. “In many instances we find ourselves in contractual agreement with an owner; therefore, we need to be completely transparent with how we bill those owners. We needed a high level of sophistication with reporting and knew that we had to provide the same level of reporting employed by general contractors,” remarked Eastman.
The Result
Since switching to CMiC, North Mechanical now works with real-time data. The audit trails on accounts payable mean that anybody who is given secure access to the system can read through the full history, eliminating the dependency on a select few employees in the office to provide the information. “It doesn’t matter where an employee is working at any given time—on a job site, at home or at an airport. We want them accessing live data and working on our system with real-time information so that we can run our business with the greatest efficiency and productivity,” commented Eastman.
With the help of CMiC Professional Services, North Mechanical is currently building a real-time integration between CMiC Cloud and MSI Data, the cloud-based service application that will replace NMC’s outdated Service unit software. “Based on my industry research, the ability to have our primary application, CMiC Cloud, afford us the option to build this real-time integration is unparalleled. We are very excited to know both our Construction and Service operations will soon be fully cloud based and integrated on a real-time basis,” added Eastman.
Other Benefits North Mechanical Enjoys with CMiC:
- Eliminating multiple paper processes—including those for invoices and time cards—from their
workflow, enabled by integrations with eTime and, in the near future, DocuSign - Faster task completion times from real-time collaboration between their Operations and Contracting groups
- Support from the CMiC User Group (‘CMUG’) community for discussions on tips and best practices
- Streamlining credit card, payment and purchasing processes through the Comdata integration