By Jason Good on July 31, 2020
Tags: Case Studies
Noyes Air Conditioning Contractors, Inc., or NAC Group (www.nacgroup.com), was founded in 1983 by the Noyes family. They have been involved in the HVAC service industry since the 1950s and their early commitments to integrity and excellence have allowed NAC to flourish and thrive in the Washington, DC Metro area. As a full-service mechanical contractor who specializes in HVAC systems, NAC Group is one of the most innovative providers in the industry. From being one of the first to offer 24-hour equipment monitoring to being members of the US Green Building Council, NAC Group has continued to evolve to better serve their customers.
They provide a range of HVAC services including Design/Build Construction, Mechanical Renovations, Repair/Maintenance Contracts, Emergency Rentals, and Energy Efficiency Consultations just to name a few. In order to continue to provide better services to their customers and continue to expand the business, they needed their HVAC technicians in the field to work more efficiently. Valuable time was being lost to outdated paper processes and systems.
Like many businesses today, NAC historically used a paper process for documenting their HVAC work and recording their technicians’ time. Technicians filled out paper forms in the field and drove them back to the office each week for processing by the office personnel. According to Chris Kaufman, General Manager at NAC Group, “Capturing our technician’s time accurately on Monday mornings was a two-day ritual.” It required two full-time employees 48 hours to complete so that payroll could be entered on Wednesday.
Also, says Chris, “Details about repairs that needed to be quoted usually required a second trip by a Sales Engineer.” In the DC Metro area that averaged out to a 3 hour trip at $100.00 per hour not including fuel costs.
In September of 2014, NAC went live with the GoCanvas platform to address their challenges. GoCanvas, the global leader in mobile forms for businesses, has helped thousands of HVAC businesses replace cumbersome paper forms with highly customizable mobile forms that improved their data collection and productivity.
Businesses can search for over 20,000 mobile form templates in the GoCanvas Application store that can be completely customized with the online, drag-and-drop App Builder tool. Using that same tool, many businesses elect to build their own forms from scratch. Factor in features like Dispatch, Workflow, uploading your price and customer lists, and integration with other systems and GoCanvas dramatically changes the way work gets done.
“Before choosing GoCanvas it was a complicated and difficult experience. We tested several tablets and platforms as well as using fillable PDFs and third party file sharing apps. At one point we thought we had finalized an acceptable process using iPads and a file sharing service, but we discovered GoCanvas and it was an enormous change for the better”, says Chris.
Like most GoCanvas subscribers, implementation is done in stages. It takes a time commitment, but the benefits are substantial. “After testing some GoCanvas Forms with five users”, says Chris, “we went all-in and pushed it to the field with very little difficulty. Surprisingly it was very smooth.” GoCanvas worked closely with Chris during the entire process from the testing phase to the full deployment.
NAC now has over 50 technicians on the GoCanvas platform. Over 1,200 mobile HVAC forms are filled out each month by NAC’s HVAC technicians. All of the data is immediately transmitted to the office so their business can keep moving.
The impact of using GoCanvas has been dramatic to say the very least. NAC Group’s new process has delivered in a big way.
Chris’s advice for going mobile with your HVAC business?