Item: HCSS
Rating: 10
Author: Heather Gunzelmann

Support Rating

I have had frustrations with the support. The more senior support reps are amazing. A lot of newer ones do not seem to understand the system and they don't seem to get how everything connects, specifically between Heavy Bid and Heavy Job. Almost all our significant problems had to be escalated to an implementer, programmer, or higher level individual. I find support lacking in in-depth issues but fine for basic questions. Although sometimes I have been given conflicting information from different reps. The best thing that happened for me was to be able to go to a user group last year, get everything I had issues with resolved and then didn't have to get in touch with support at all.

Implementation Rating

The implementation team is not given enough time to work with their clients. There should be a follow-up visit, included in the price, after the initial implementation. We had various issues and paid to have the implementer come back to help and then we went to a user group and got the rest resolved. We implemented in April of 2015 but didn't get all the value out of Heavy Job and Heavy Bid until we came back from a user group in January of 2016. We had so many issues between Heavy Job and Timberline, issues between what the salesperson told us would happen versus what the system did, and a lot of prep and follow-up that just isn't enough to really get the programs going.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Heavy Job Mobile in the field, Heavy Job Manager in the office, Dispatcher in the office, and Equipment 360 in our fleet department. It is used across the whole organization. Heavy Job addresses the prior problems we had with: time sheets and information from the field, production reports and planning, forecasting, time and material reporting, true up with our accounting system and many others. Dispatcher has not been as effective as we would have liked and found some basic issues with its use. Equipment 360 has helped track maintenance and other issues.

Pros and Cons

Heavy Job is excellent for field to office communications. There are many valuable features and the program is very robust.
Heavy Job has been invaluable to me specifically on reporting production and performance in the field to ownership.
There are many different things you can use Heavy Job for, including tracking trucking costs with outside vendors. This has also been a huge benefit for our company.

Our biggest struggle is with Dispatcher. It does not truly help us with our needs and we resorted back to pen, paper, and excel spreadsheets when we hit our busiest time of the year in the fall.
Dispatcher does not seem to have had as much attention given to it as Heavy Job. Heavy Job far outweighs Dispatcher in many aspects. Dispatcher needs more versatility and better features.
Examples: we move crews around on a daily basis and that is difficult in Dispatcher. You need to be able to move job around fluidly as well as being able to keep track of them and see the projects on a weekly/monthly/extended view. The planner view is not beneficial and lacks many desired features. Dispatcher also does not have any proactive features, reminders, real tracking of projects to it.
If HCSS would give more focus to this program, then it could be used to target more subcontractor companies like us, as well as larger contractors. Most of the prime contractors that we work with use Heavy Bid and Heavy Job but not Dispatcher. I am going to bet because it isn't satisfying the needs of your contractors/customers.

Alternatives Considered

I've looked at a couple different software systems, both at this company and others, and nothing has compared to Heavy Bid and Heavy Job. The versatility and functions of both are truly amazing and have helped us in many ways. Other systems just don't compare.

Likelihood to Recommend

Heavy Job and Heavy Bid are AMAZING! We can't describe how beneficial these two programs have been to our company and would HIGHLY recommend them both to everyone and have. I will be attending the user group meeting this year (2nd one) and focusing on Dispatcher. If we can't put Dispatcher to the use that we need, then we will probably discontinue the program. The Safety Program sounded amazing but the cost was too high. I've heard that the cost has come down so we may revisit that in the next 1-2 years. Equipment 360 seems to be working well and I've been pushing to implement the GPS system as well.
Side note: my boss keeps asking me if I'm selling HCSS program on the side since I've pushed hard for the products at our company. There are a lot of great programs and the implementation team is top notch.

You won't be disappointed with HCSS!

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with HCSS