"From a management point of view,  Landon Lovingfoss, an engineer with the heavy civil contractor Stacy and Witbeck, in Portland, Ore., a member of multiple AGC chapters, including the Oregon-Columbia Chapter. 

Stacy and Witbeck uses it for timecard and diary entries, quantities used, notes on production and projections. 

 "We’ve been able to eliminate several mundane steps, such as driving the timecards to the office, and have eliminated transcription errors," Lovingfoss says. 

Flatiron of Firestone, Colo., also uses the HCSS mobile app for timecard entry, recording equipment use and foreman diary note taking. The company first used it on a project in a remote area of British Columbia.

"The biggest benefit we’ve seen is the quickness with which the information can be transferred from the field to the office," says Adam Kuyt, risk control and contract manager at Flatiron. "Flatiron’s motivation was to get good daily production information, so we knew what our costs were on every shift."

That knowledge is the prime advantage offered though the software, says Steve McGough, chief operating officer at HCSS in Sugar Land, Texas. "Because we can push down the estimate to the mobile device, you can see how you are doing and whether you made money or lost money that day," McGough adds. "It was designed for field people. A foreman charges the crew and equipment out against the individual cost codes, and when you send the information, it takes it into the manager’s system of HeavyJob and sends it on to payroll."

The app also allows field personnel to take photos and transmit them with notes. The software tags them with a GPS location and adds them to the job file.

The HeavyJob mobile app can be run anywhere using iPhones, iPads and Android-based phones and tablets. It can function off-line and will sync-up when reconnected to the Internet via Wi-Fi.

"It’s a mobile app native to the device, so you are not browsing to a web page," McGough explains.

The mobile app is available to users of HeavyJob for $10 per user per month and the field system is available to companies not using the HeavyJob field system for $50 per user per month. 

"We are trying to give people the ability to use the best device for the situation, so you don’t have to make wholesale changes," McGough says." You can run half of your company on laptops and half on tablets. It doesn’t matter to us."

HCSS now has a HeavyBid mobile app in beta testing. Both of its mobile products are intuitive and user friendly. Lovingfoss says it’s so user friendly, a new foreman can become proficient in a couple of days with a tablet and the software.

"The product development team at HCSS has been good to work with," Kuyt adds. "They keep developing the software, and there are more bells and whistles coming."