Internet-based Business Tools for Electrical Contractors
SmartContractor was a small, lean start-up providing online tools to subcontractors in the construction trade, starting with SmartElectrical, to be followed by SmartMechanical, SmartHVAC and SmartPlumbing. Each site was to offer construction project management, materials procurement, union benefit reporting, custom content and training, and news all in one site.
Project Pro was a project management tool designed for SmartElectrical to streamline the process of communicating time and materials used on a job and for general project coordination.
Foremen and employees could use a simple mobile Time Cards app or the SmartElectrical site to submit hours into ProjectPro and those hours could be reviewed and managed by the home office admin staff and business owner.
This functionality was eventually wrapped into the Union Benefits Reporting tool to extend data access to the Union Benefits administrators.
As part of the project team, I conducted on-site customer visits to see first-hand how our customers collected, used and shared project data, particularly employee time cards.
It was immediately apparent that we could dramatically minimize the amount of redundant data entry for the project managers and office staff who spent a lot of time transferring data from one paper form to another and then into multiple spreadsheets and payroll systems.
Using high-level functional requirements I designed a spare, simple UI for a user base that was not highly tech savvy.
I constructed the mockups in both PNG graphic format and in HTML pages, providing code that the engineering team used directly in the final .asp pages.