Based in Tampa, FL, Spartan Contracting Co. is a full-service general contractor with expertise in commercial construction and property maintenance, pre-construction, design-build, and green building. Their philosophy is simple yet powerful: do a good job, do it right, and do it on time.
With offices in Georgia and across Florida, Spartan is always looking for ways to be more efficient with its planning and more effective with its people. This includes a better understanding how project opportunities and bids will impact their team. This led Spartan President and CEO Scott Kramer to inquire about integrating Bridgit Bench with their CRM tool, Salesforce.
How does Spartan use Bridgit Bench?
First and foremost, the team at Spartan uses Bridgit Bench to allocate their superintendents, project managers, accounting managers, estimators, etc. “We can quickly see who’s on what job, how long they are there for, and when they’re going to be available,” explained Kramer. “If a client wants to start a job on a specific date, we can see who will be available. It’s made us smarter about staffing our active and upcoming projects.”
The team at Spartan also uses Bridgit Bench to balance work across multiple offices. “North Florida has been extremely busy for us,” said Kramer, “We’ve started pulling available project managers from Georgia and South Florida to relieve some of the burdens on the North Florida team.”
Kramer has also started using the forecasting dashboard to understand upcoming project needs. “We have 21 superintendents so that we can do 21 jobs at a time,” said Kramer, “We’re not going to get every job that we’re pursuing, but if we’ve got 5-10 jobs awarded first and another 50, we’re pursuing, we know we’ll need more help.”
The ability to look five years into the future helps Spartan build a more inclusive and robust strategy for organizational growth. It helps business development and marketing teams know which projects to bid on and when because they know who will be available and when. It gives HR a longer runway to find great talent. With a labor shortage as bad as this industry is facing, giving the HR team a heads-up months in advance could lead to much stronger hires rather than the last-minute scrambles that are all too common in construction.
How does Spartan use Salesforce?
The project management team at Spartan uses Salesforce to track project opportunities. “Everything from the different stages of the project lifecycle up to being awarded or lost,” explained Kramer. “It’s a nice, central repository for any projects on our radar.”
It also helps Spartan understand, as Kramer puts it, “where our bread is buttered.” “I can see not only who our best clients are but also the individual project managers those clients want to work with,” said Kramer. “I can tell you, because of Salesforce, that while South Florida has historically been our busiest market, North Florida has taken over this year. It’s good to see all that information.”
The Challenge with multiple software systems
Kramer quickly pointed out that having information stored in different systems can stifle information sharing and increase the amount of manual data entry. “That was probably my biggest complaint,” said Kramer, “Our software stack is mostly siloed information, which also leads to double, triple, sometimes quadruple data input. We would have to build the job in Salesforce and then hop over to Bridgit Bench and build it again there.”
“Bridgit did a phenomenal job getting them to work with one another. It’s saved so much time it’s incredible. I couldn’t tell you how much it’s been a time saver to the entire organization.”
Scott Kramer, President and CEO at Spartan Contracting Co.
The Solution
The team at Spartan recently reached out to Bridgit about integrating their workforce planning with Salesforce. They wanted the ability to automatically pull new projects to understand how each would impact their team. “Bridgit did a phenomenal job getting them to work with one another,” said Kramer regarding the integration, “It’s saved so much time; it’s incredible. I couldn’t tell you how much it’s been a time saver to the entire organization.”
What was the integration setup process like?
At Bridgit, when we get a request for an integration, we assign one of our integration specialists to do all the heavy lifting. In this case, Bridgit assigned Lucas Cugini to help guide Spartan through the process. “Lucas was great. I want him to do customization for us moving forward. He was that good,” Kramer said about his experience getting the integration up and running. “He was responsive, easy to work with, and he presented timelines that he beat. That’s how you want to do it, under promise and over deliver.”
What was the lift on Spartan’s end? “It was relatively seamless and easy for us,” said Kramer. “Once we got the info to Bridgit, it was straightforward. There wasn’t a whole lot for us to do.”
We look forward to continuing to work with Spartan and general contractors like them to develop a more responsive software stack that gives them the right information at the right time and place. For more information about Bridgit Bench, take a quick tour, or visit our integrations page to see the full lineup of available integrations.
