Anderson Columbia
Anderson Columbia has an illustrious history in the construction industry. For 62 years, they have built everything from highways to runways. Apart from laying high-safety asphalt and concrete, they also produce award-winning materials from their own plants. Millions depend on this industry giant for smooth transportation and quality heavy civil contracting. And unsurprisingly, the number of people they hire runs into the high thousands.
Project introduction
In a bid to tackle the infamous buddy punch, Anderson Columbia hired freelance developers to build a custom solution. They expected this project to take a year, but it stretched to three. Using a combination of Excel and a patchy interface, Timeshift 1.0 didn’t live up to expectations. With no drastic improvement in sight, Anderson put the project on hold to rethink the solution.
Challenge
Timeshift 1.0 was unstable and threw tracking, verification, and payroll entirely out of sync. The freelance development team hosted the data in a managed datacenter and every change to the data happened over a phone call to the center. This ate up time and increased the scope for errors: something Anderson Columbia never allowed for.
Solution
After three years of limbo with Timeshift 1.0, Anderson Columbia decided it was time for change and hired us to revive the project. Right from the start, our vision was clear: marrying classic job-cost accounting with quick, reliable, and usable biometrics.
Leveraging AWS and MongoDB, we rebuilt the solution from scratch with high-quality code. The rebuild cost Anderson Columbia a third of what they had previously shelled out—in terms of both money and time. We piloted the solution in a year and instantly made an impact on the daily workers’ payroll. Soon enough, the solution started bringing down business and process costs by closely tracking workers’ productivity and helping supervisors manage job sites economics reliably.
“With good ideas, contact, and feedback, Mutual Mobile has been able to save almost half an hour per day per person, by the use of biometrics, which is a lot of money for a company of our size. A completely new code written without bugs took about a third of the time as the first attempt for around a third of the price.” - Bert Myers, Controller at Anderson Columbia
Outcome
Our biometric time-tracking solution helped Anderson Columbia beat the notorious buddy punch and shave off nearly 30 minutes a day per employee. For a company of their size, that is a sizable saving.
Since we custom-built the solution for them, Anderson Columbia can freely analyze data, request changes, and push updates. This gives them total ownership of the solution and how they choose to deploy it.
By handing the project over to us, Anderson Columbia achieved its goals at a third of the money and time previously spent. Moreover, the solution helped lower their business and process costs, giving them more money to reinvest in adding value.
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