HCSS vs monday.com

Our operation uses several pieces of what we call specialty equipment (not used every day on every job). The foreman when finished will give a location of where this equipment is left, this many times can be very vague and lead to a lowboy driver trying to block around to find the piece or driving down a street he cannot get turned around in. With the GPS devices, the driver can pinpoint exactly where the unit is and if he has room to turn around at that location.

Project management is much simpler and allows you to have greater control over each resource, both human, financial, and technological. This also allows you to have greater control over budgets. The graphics and panels it offers, in addition to the overview, are the perfect tool to stay organized.

• #1 is support! HCSS is by far the best software support of any product we have ever used. Unlike most software companies HCSS utilizes their support calls to help upgrade their software. When you here them tell you that they will write down a particular issue you come across during a support call if they can't help you then and there they will research and get an answer to you extremely fast. If the software will not do it, you can bet there is a good chance it will be on the list of enhancements you will see come out in the near future.
• Estimating software is very extensive. Their software is capable of handling the smallest estimate all the way to the largest joint venture estimate. It has advanced features that make it extremely useful for analyzing job materials, subcontractors etc.
• HeavyJob is an extremely useful tool for the field to keep the office up to date with job costs. Everything is at the Foreman's fingertips on Tablets to allow the information from the field to get uploaded to HeavyJob manager which then can export to accounting. We are also able to give our Foreman the ability to deal with the Daily and weekly safety needs (Tailgate Meetings, incident Investigation, observations etc.) right on the Tablets thru HeavyJob.

• Team Organization/Accountability - Can see what everyone has on their plate, where they are at with a project, and add new projects when necessary.
• Highly customizable workspaces - There are table items for EVERYTHING. Status updates, URLs, Due dates, Hour of the day, text fields, number fields, user tagging, and so much more. You can organize or track ANYTHING in any way that makes sense to you.
• Automations - Can create automations to remind people of tasks (in program and through integrations with other software such as Slack), can automatically make tasks populate, and endless other configurations and dependencies.

• All their apps are on mobile devices. Although there is not a clear company policy on Android versus iPhone. Updates for features lag behind on Android. Some apps are exclusive to one platform making it hard to fully interconnect all programs.

• Being able to prevent users from being able to easily change job request templates would be a big help.
• I would like the default listing of completed items in descending order of date. That would make it easier for reporting to be able to glimpse a given week or month and count the number of items completed vs. having to scroll to the bottom of the list. I change the setting constantly, but it seems to revert back to the oldest items on top.

It solves all our needs the exact way we imagined it. coming across monday gave us the feeling that we designed the program ourselves to work for the use cases we had in mind.

As mentioned, user interface appears messy and complicated at initial onset. Training is necessary but becomes easy to maneuver through after solid daily use.

It sparks joy from the inner geek and master organizer in me. I've tried so many other tools that had a steep learning curve and seem like more work to manage than they were worth. monday.com has a great user interface, it's highly customizable and can be set up in minutes. They also have great resources if you need a bit more help. If you think it can do it, it probably does. Don't be afraid to play.

I have never had a bad experience or heard of one in 4 years of doing business with HCSS. That is unheard of even with the hurricanes and flooding in Houston area it feels like HCSS was always there and willing to help in every way.

Using monday.com, I've been blown away by the quality of customer service I've received. The only way I can think of is to have a different support person respond to a follow-up inquiry if you require more information. To avoid feeling as though a new person has joined a conversation, it would be wonderful to be able to converse with the same person again and over again.

To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.

I was not employed with PPI upon implementation. I would prefer to reference my previous statement, that each company needs to evaluate its culture and address your implementation accordingly. The purchasing company should assign an employee as point person and really take charge of not just the technical side of the implementation (HCSS pretty much handles that), but focus on company culture and training.

We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.

Other estimating products I have used consist of ICE/MC2 and MS Excel. ICE was not a good fit for our company, as they have awful technical support and offer very poor training. MS Excel is great for simple estimates where there is not a lot of data being compiled. However neither hold a candle to the power of HCSS Heavybid

We used an excel spreadsheet to track our month end close process previously which created a lot of issues around only one person being able to be in the checklist at any given time. Additionally, we were unable to have excel notify us when a task we need to have completed was done, but Monday.com has completely changed that for us!

• The biggest ROI for us was the ease of adoption by field personnel.

• Positive - Good for basic organization of projects
• Positive - Good for tracking who is working on a project
• Negative - Layout and arrangement of buttons and tolls for update a bit confusing
• Negative - Quick acquisition of information not intuitive