With over 35 years in the industry, Duron Atlantic is one of the leading multi-trade contractors in Atlantic Canada. Throughout its history, the company has demonstrated extensive expertise in concrete restoration services, coating, and water protection, swiftly taking on some of the most complex projects in the region.
Duron Atlantic has not changed much at its core since its founding: the team continues to pride itself on delivering excellent quality work, exceeding customer expectations, and working quickly.
Still, Duron’s focus on completing work left room for internal investment into their own business. They had continued with many outdated processes, like paper timesheets and forms. In fact, just about everything on the administrative side required heavy lifting and a considerable time commitment.
tying safety to every aspect of our operations
We were hesitant to take the leap into the digital world beyond spreadsheets, but everyone had insisted that software could manage many of the challenges we were facing. We began exploring solutions, feeling skeptical at every turn.
Evaluating which software suited our needs turned out to be exhausting. Our team underwent an extensive research process over the course of several weeks before narrowing our evaluation to four solutions.
We were nervous about committing to Assignar, but when we got in touch with another customer, all he did was rave about the platform and the team. What called out to us about Assignar was how well it tied safety into every aspect of our operations.
timesheets = immediate impact
We rolled out Assignar during our busiest time of year. While waiting to have less on our plate seemed enticing, everything worked out even better than imagined.
We decided to roll out timesheets because we felt that they were going to have an immediate impact on our business. Our team was nervous because although we knew that Assignar would help our business, the feedback from the field team can differ dramatically.
At that point in time, we had 30 workers that didn’t want to use mobile devices at all for standard processes. In fact, our business was doing things in a super old-fashioned way. Can you believe we were still using paper timesheets?
“In the first month, we already had 90% buy-in. By the second month, everyone was fully on board with Assignar. It was a huge success for us,” says Eric Gillis, Operations Manager.
The reality is that our team realized that this wasn’t just an investment in the business, but in them, too. Assignar simplifies most of what they do and helps to give them time back every day. Our field crews no longer have to drive long distances back to the office just to make sure they get paid.
scaling from 30 to 100 employees
We couldn’t have expanded the way we did without Assignar. We added 70 new employees since implementing the platform, but only one of them has an administrative role. If you have a person doing an administrative job in your office, you can probably get Assignar to do the same job
We didn’t have to hire additional administrative staff because we hired Assignar.” – Eric Gillis, Operations Manager
Instead, we were able to put more resources into training and execution. Along with the recent expansion, we’ve increased our productivity and we’re delivering better work to our customers. We couldn’t have done that without Assignar.
Our people are everything to us. Assignar was an investment in them as well as our business.
Simplicity, savings, Data, & Flexibility
While customer stories might feel anecdotal at times, we can tell you that Assignar has helped our company from dozens of angles. A lot of people can sell something once, but keeping customers coming back is the hard part. Here are a few reasons we will continue to work with Assignar:
SIMPLICITY
As construction professionals, we worry more about what we do out there in the field, we forget to think about how we can streamline things for our customers and our employees. Assignar does the latter for us.
SAVINGS
How can you add 69 people in the field and only add one person for admin? You do it with Assignar.
The impact on our business has been immense. At this point, we’re only using about 20% of Assignar’s full functionality, and we’re saving 25 hours on payroll alone each week.
“We can already account for $25k in savings on payroll alone each year. This isn’t even considering the cost savings tied to employee travel time back to the office.” – Eric Gillis, Operations Manager
DATA
From a forms and certification standpoint, Assignar is just brilliant. We can make forms in five minutes to immediately start capturing the data we need from the field. In fact, we had an instance where an inspector showed up on-site and asked us to start using an additional form. We created it right then and there and alerted our teams to start using it immediately.
I can’t even put a dollar amount to the improvements we have seen with Assignar. Getting information in real time is invaluable to our team.
We have said goodbye to most delays because we now have all of our information daily. We used to have to wait a couple of weeks when we had far-away projects. Getting that information quickly is invaluable to our team.
FLEXIBILITY
We continue to find ways that Assignar can help and track other items in our business, even in fuel consumption allocation. We have 35 trucks out there. Prior to Assignar, we had a server that housed the database of gas reports. It was messy to navigate and calculating the consumption per job was a nightmare. Now we simply pull hours by month and job using Assignar reports. That’s all it takes to get our consumption percentage per job.
Assignar has served as a great way to validate and navigate discrepancies in our business, especially in hours and billing.
Assignar is remarkably user-friendly. It has one of the best interfaces I’ve seen.
On top of that, it works seamlessly across all of our devices, whether they’re Mac or PCs. We’re not having to battle internally with changes in software depending on the operating system — it simply works.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer service and assistance are astounding. Our Customer Success Manager is quick and always has an answer.
We are so pleased with what the software can do and even more thrilled with the level of assistance and customer service Assignar provides.
In the end, it isn’t just pie in the sky. We feel we have a competitive advantage because we have the right tools to keep our people and customers happy, improve our bottom line, and simultaneously improve safety and compliance across the company.”