Service Electric Co. To Employ Yardz Platform For Asset and Warehouse Management

Posted by Brooke Just 

Yardz, a tool for managing owned and rented assets, announced that Service Electric Co. has purchased licenses to use the Yardz technology platform in its Florida region.

Service Electric Co., which builds electrical transmission and distribution lines for Duke Energy (a division of Duke Energy) and Florida Power, will use Yardz to manage its extensive fleet and equipment inventory. The Yardz technology platform allows contractors to see all their rented (and owned) equipment in one place. This helps them manage their equipment and ensure that each piece is allocated effectively and cost efficiently to the places it’s needed most as well as saving money on duplicate and overdue rentals.

Service Electric Co. participated in the design and flow of new features through Yardz’s customer voice development process. The result for Service Electric Co. is the ability to automate and perform a variety of warehouse management and other internal functions previously handled through antiquated paper methods and tedious spreadsheets.

The buildout of the enhanced program features began in August 2021. Within two months, a “soft” rollout of the custom features began, as Service Electric started using the equipment maintenance function. By November they had implemented the logistics and dispatch portion; by the beginning of 2022, the full management capabilities of asset inspections, job costing, and other new features of the platform will be ready for deployment. 

Bruce Schwerin, fleet manager for Service Electric Co.’s Florida region, said he was actually looking for a warehouse management solution when Yardz entered the picture.

“Yardz came to me pitching the rental aspect of their tool, where they actually track all of your rentals from all your suppliers,” Schwerin said. “The platform gives you notifications to let you know when rental periods are over, so you don’t have pieces of equipment hanging around when a job’s complete, which helps avoid late fees.”

After seeing the potential, Schwerin asked Yardz CEO Jason Perez if he could add warehouse logistics, driver dispatch, and other management functions to the core program – functions that Schwerin’s team was performing manually with whiteboards, paper forms, and software that wasn’t up to the task. The resulting product has been well-received throughout the Yardz customer base.

“Yardz has worked hard to incorporate full warehouse management and logistics functions into their tool,” Schwerin said. “We were able to maintain tight inventory control with the core program right away, but now I can do my dispatching from the program as well.

“A driver might receive an email saying to pick up a unit from a certain project; they log into their email, and the unit gets picked up in transit. And when they deliver it, no paperwork is necessary. Nothing gets lost in translation through the emails; all of the human error has been taken out of the dispatch process.”

The Yardz platform also helps Service Electric Co. manage its equipment repairs. Now, mechanics can go into the history of each vehicle, and in one place see the vehicle’s complete repair and maintenance history. Repairs and maintenance tasks are color-coded by priority, so the most urgent jobs are done first – and no job is overlooked.

Schwerin noted that Florida is the pilot for the company as a whole. Assuming that the pilot is successful, a rollout across other regions will occur in the near future.

“I was able to say to Yardz, ‘This is my vision, this is what I’m looking for,’” said Schwerin. “And they took my vision and made it a reality.”