Overview

Location: Roswell, Georgia, USA
Industry: Residential and commercial painting

Services

• Advises painting companies on operational efficiency
• Provides outsourcing services for financial, human resources, marketing and administrative functions
• Assists partners in implementing NetSuite and NextService

About TPC Construction Management Services

TPC Construction Management Services works closely with top management inside its partner companies to guide them, help them make key decisions, and serve as their corporate office for some functions. The partner companies outsource much of their financial, marketing, and human resources activities to TPC.

The partners include:
• Atlanta Painting Company, established in 2006, has become one of the largest residential painting companies in north Georgia.
• Southeastern Commercial Painting, based in Roswell, Georgia, specializes in senior living, multifamily and hospitality markets.
• State 28 Painting, through its persistent dedication to customer satisfaction, has grown to become one of the most trusted painting companies in Dallas, Texas.
• Nashville Painting Company built its reputation on providing the highest level of service and quality for customers.

After convincing its partners that outmoded systems and processes would hamper their growth and profitability, TPC helped them identify and implement two integrated solutions: NextService and Oracle’s NetSuite. Just a few months later, TPC’s partners are already seeing major improvements in efficiency, reporting, and communications throughout their field and back-office operations.

Business Challenges

TPC Construction Management Services helps painting companies overcome common challenges so they can manage their businesses efficiently.

“Often we see painting companies using a mix of automated systems, semi-automated tools, communication channels, and manual processes to handle their field service, billing, and reporting activities,” said Heather Roberson, TPC’s Director of Customer Experience. “For example, some of our partners were using Google Calendar and email for scheduling. Data had to be entered in multiple places, which left a lot of room for error and ultimately unreliable reporting and inefficient processes.”

The biggest challenges faced by TPC’s partners, Roberson noted, were communications and reporting.

Information between the field and office personnel typically flowed through multiple channels, including voice, text, email, and communications tools such as Slack. To find something specific, therefore, employees had to look in multiple places and then consolidate that information with information from other sources.

With information residing in diverse places, reporting was slow, inefficient, and often incomplete. “Some of our partners could not track revenue at the project level,” said Roberson. “Their estimates on labor and materials were often inaccurate. Getting timely, accurate service reports was difficult, and they also struggled with billing.”

Why TPC Chose NetSuite + NextService

TPC’s partners needed to replace multiple, outmoded systems with better technology capable of sustaining their long-term growth. To help its partners streamline their field service and internal business operations, TPC Construction Management Services began looking for a way to manage information for multiple functions on a unified, cloud-based platform.

“Our comptroller’s husband has extensive knowledge of NetSuite and strongly recommended it,” said Roberson. “NextService, in turn, was recommended by NetSuite when we mentioned the importance of having one system to manage both the office side and the field side of a partner’s business. The fact that the two worked seamlessly together made the choice a no brainer.”

TPC became a NextService customer in April 2021 and began helping the partner companies implement it, one by one.

Business Impact for TPC

Although TPC’s partners are in the early months of using NextService, all are already achieving benefits.

The painting companies are making good use of NextService’s capabilities for scheduling and service changes. Roberson said she expects the benefits will expand as they gain familiarity with the system’s flexibility, ease of use, and configuration flexibility.

NextService has also dramatically simplified a formerly troublesome task: Service reports from the job site. The NextService mobile app enables field managers and technicians to breeze through checklists and complete service reports easily. All information generated or updated in the field is instantly accessible by management and back-office personnel.

“Now the project managers just go to the job site checklist and check boxes,” Roberson explained. “Everything is right there—check, check, check!—and all the data flows directly into NetSuite. Submitting the checklist triggers an automatic email of the report to the people who need it.”

According to Roberson, having all information—from job schedules and work orders to forms and invoices—in one place is making substantial improvements in efficiency for TPC’s partners. She believes the efficiencies will soon result in measurable cost savings.

TPC partners are also seeing vastly improved internal communications between the field and the office, she added.

“It’s now so much easier for project managers in the field to change a job’s status—for example, the job is completed, or the job needs to be extended by two days. When they make a change, the office staff knows immediately, without anyone texting, emailing or calling. It’s just a quicker, more efficient way to communicate—and definitely the biggest benefit so far. Once we are a little further along with implementation, we will be freeing up time for project coordinators, schedulers, and salespeople to be able to handle more tasks,” Roberson said.

Roberson is also pleased with NextService’s short learning curve. Even though she doesn’t use the system as a field manager or a back-office person, she has learned to use the system just by watching others demonstrate NextService features on Zoom calls.

“Before implementing NextService, our partners were either not getting information they needed from the field in a timely manner, or they were looking in multiple places to get the information, which could be in an email, a text message, or a Slack channel. Now they’re getting information right away, it’s more accurate, and important things aren’t getting missed or dropped. I can definitely see us saving money from NextService over time.” – Heather Roberson

Looking Ahead

Roberson reiterated that TPC partners are still learning what NextService can achieve for them. She expects system benefits to soar as users further embrace existing capabilities and new capabilities become available.

One of TPC’s short-term priorities is a customized quality control feature for the NextService mobile app. It will enable field teams to upload project photos and include descriptions and estimated resolution dates on any areas that need touch-up painting. “This will help us tremendously in giving the customer a better experience by being proactive on any issues that may arise during a project,” she said.

Roberson also plans to take advantage of the NextService mobile app’s signature capture feature and to continue streamlining invoicing and payment processing. For example, employees in the field are now able to edit the “Crew Payment Amount” in the mobile app, and the updates automatically flow through to the work order. Project managers can then access this information through a saved search, ensuring the accuracy of customer invoices. “In the near future, I see us taking advantage of additional scheduler features such as color coding and setting up regions,” she added.

“We’re just scratching the surface on what NextService is capable of. I feel like we’re just getting started,” Roberson said.