With no office, Tumlinson Electric “lives and dies by technology” to bring their team together across multiple jobsites every day. Read Tumlinson’s story to learn about their remote empowerment success.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Deep in the heart of Texas is a company finding success in a very modern workplace through the adoption and integration of technology. It is something being seen across every industry, but Tumlinson Electric may be taking it to the next level for small-medium businesses, especially within the construction industry. Tumlinson Electric is a full-service, electrical contractor providing construction services throughout the state of Texas with the promise of excellence in their work.
“Our long-standing commitment to quality, performance and service has given us an excellent reputation among our clients. From the pre-construction phase to owner occupancy and beyond, Tumlinson Electric is committed to devoting the necessary time and resources needed to complete every project safely, on schedule, and within budget”. This commitment and their experience has taught Tumlinson the importance of having the right team and giving that team the tools they need to make this goal a reality on every job.
No office…No Problem
You have probably heard it before, the modern office is changing. Gone are the days of the “classic” office setting – cubicles, high walls and “9-5” hours with heads down, working on your own projects. Today’s office has collaboration spaces, very few cubicles and employees spread out across the country or even world.
In the Construction and Field Service industry, having teams spread across multiple sites is nothing new, but it does come with its own set of challenges that technology is helping to tackle in order to bridge communication and collaboration between onsite and offsite teams. Tumlinson takes it one step further. They have no office.
In Tumlinson’s world, every employee works remotely or on a jobsite, and technology has become everything to them. When on a job site, project leaders have an iPad and each floor of a building will have a Building Information Modeling Cart, or BIM Cart, to act as a full-service mobile office allowing teams to communicate and work together. As a company, they have 26 BIM carts and 90 iPad devices with more on the way as they continue to grow at a tremendous rate.
With their continued growth, employees spread across the state, no core office space and some pretty technical workflows, it may come as a surprise that Tumlinson is succeeding without a dedicated IT Team. Brandi Watson has taken on the role of IT as a part of her job while maintaining her other responsibilities as well. Part of Tumlinson’s success with technology has come from their ability to partner themselves with multiple, great companies and lean on the knowledge, resources, and ease-of-use that those partners can offer them – starting with PlanGrid.
Build better together
PlanGrid is ushering in a new era of productivity and efficiency to the Construction industry allowing teams to communicate, build and collaborate together effectively on every project – start to finish. PlanGrid develops construction software that allows your team to share and edit blueprints, create field reports and integrates with many other software providers you already love, to deliver a complete, up-to-date project view in real-time for your entire team.
For a company like Tumlinson that “lives and dies by technology”, as Brandi Watson says, creating a trusting relationship with a partner like PlanGrid was pivotal for their success. As a company, most people on the team were very familiar with PlanGrid, which made this partnership a “no brainer” from their perspective. PlanGrid has allowed them to ensure their project teams are on the same page and working on the most up-to-date documents.
In addition to making sure that everyone is working off the most current set of blueprints, PlanGrid offers them a quick and easy way to get information out to wherever workers are located and mark up drawings to send to the jobsite’s BIM cart in real-time. Quality Assurance and Control managers can create tasks for project teams to address, photos can be attached for easy understanding and field reports, including daily logs, safety reports and a Job Hazard Analysis (JHA), can be created and sent all from within the software. It has been the perfect partnership, but from an IT perspective, Brandi had to find a way to get PlanGrid and other necessary tools onto every device knowing that she would not have much manual access to the devices.
Tumlinson + Jamf Now
Device Enrollment
App Distribution
Inventory Management
OS and App Deployment
Blueprints
Remote Lock and Wipe
Project Closeout
When it came time to address the issue of onboarding and maintaining devices for their team with limited access to devices, Tumlinson turned to their partner PlanGrid once more and were introduced to Jamf Now. Jamf Now and PlanGrid have been partners within the construction industry for use cases just like this, which is part of the reason Jamf Now serves over 1500 construction and field service companies.
Without an office, Jamf Now’s ability to supply central management for Tumlinson’s iPad devices was the ticket to Brandi’s success. She could handle all of Tumlinson’s inventory management, check on device status and deploy any updates operating systems needed without invading the team’s work. In addition, they have had devices go missing from work sites. With Jamf Now she was quickly able to lock those devices down and, on some occasions, remotely wipe them to protect company data. While this wasn’t ideal, Jamf Now provided a smooth way to remain secure and to react quickly to the potential threat.
Most important for Tumlinson was Jamf Now allowing them to deploy PlanGrid from a central location. They could deploy PlanGrid, email settings and all the needed apps to newly enrolled devices for employee onboarding – a process that would have been a much longer and more difficult one for new employees that are remote. Tumlinson made onboarding a sleek process by creating several Blueprints classifications within Jamf Now that allow them to split up the needs of their teams by roles and responsibilities so that each role gets exactly what they need when they go to a jobsite.
Jamf Now offers Tumlinson the ability to “set it and forget it” until it comes time to enroll another device or push out updates to PlanGrid, which is perfect for Brandi who has the rest of her job outside of IT and device management. Her world moves fast, so being able to log into Jamf Now and easily make the changes and adjustments required to respond to the team’s needs has become the exact solution she wanted.
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