Customer Stories

Leading electrical contractor supercharges operations with Hoylu ​

Piquette & Howard Electric Service Logo

est. 1972

Plaistow, New Hampshire

Electrical and crane and hoist contractor

Hoylu Value

Reliable documentation

Improved Planning

Responsive to user feedback

Prefab production coordination

As a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), Piquette & Howard Electric Service was founded in 1972. Founder R. Bruce Howard, his son, David Howard, and their highly experienced staff are committed to providing high-quality electrical and crane and hoist services to all types of industrial and commercial clientele throughout New England. Additionally, the team achieves high levels of client satisfaction, fulfills the demands of project timelines and completes value engineering to meet clients’ budgets.

Introduction

Piquette & Howard Electric Service (P&H), a leading electrical and crane and hoist contractor in Plaistow, New Hampshire, specializes in complex projects in the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and life sciences industries, as well as industrial and heavy commercial construction.  

Challenge

Many of P&H’s clients are global leaders in research and treatment, whose new facilities must be built to exacting specifications and meet a complex array of certifications.   

These facilities often include clean rooms, specially engineered environments free of contamination used in pharmaceutical research and production, which pose a particular challenge in coordination and scheduling. 

“Basically, you’re doing a two-year project in seven months. That’s how these projects are, because they all want to get it done first—they want to lead the industry,” explains James Lessard, a general foreman at P&H who also serves as an assistant project manager and an assistant design team member. Frustrated by the limitations of Excel-based planning, P&H sought a digital planning tool that was easy to use and fully adaptable to their needs.   
“Basically, you’re doing a two-year project in seven months. That’s how these projects are, because they all want to get it done first—they want to lead the industry.”
James Lessard
General foreman, Piquette & Howard Electric 

Solution

To deliver on their clients’ ambitious project timelines, P&H needed a planning solution that gave them flexibility to structure the plan to their needs, with detailed KPIs and variance and constraint tracking to prevent any schedule slippage or miscommunication. After testing several other digital planning tools, Lessard recommended the adoption of Hoylu.

As a foreman, he primarily relies on the platform for task creation, setting durations, and manpower tracking. The team also uses the whiteboard much like a physical whiteboard, pinning time-sensitive information such as submittals or RFIs with links for quick access.

As a specialty contractor, P&H has a large prefab division that supports their work on site. “We do a lot of in-wall prefab and pipe bending and everything else. We have software that tells us to do a pipe run from here to there, it tells you all the bends you’re going to make. We can literally put a pipe run together in our shop and send it to the job and install it,” Lessard explains. His team uses Hoylu to track the status of the prefab buildouts and the expected delivery dates.

Results

The P&H team has seen numerous benefits since adopting Hoylu as their digital solution for project planning. In addition to its utility as a pull planning tool, having a real-time record of the project has been invaluable for documentation and risk reduction. If work is not completed as planned due to circumstances outside of P&H’s control, the team is able to cite the reason based on the documented plan.

Now in their third year of using Hoylu, the P&H team’s digital planning capabilities are still growing. Confident in their mastery of the Hoylu platform, Lessard says that the next step is to find new ways to leverage its functionality, and to benefit from newly released features, some of which P&H has directly influenced.

“I’m more than pleased with what the Hoylu team was able to generate and it’s great to know they listen to their clients and deliver results. The Hoylu team is extremely interactive and, in my opinion, second to none. It proves a lot when you deliver features suggested by your clients,” says Lessard.

About Hoylu

Our platform offers you and your team the power of unified planning with an intuitive solutionthat combinesfeature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management. Plan, engage, and visualize your projects with best-in-class usability and integrations. Bring your best ideas together with your best data across disparate teams and solutions for unified, unlimited, unbeatable project planning. 

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