October 2024 Vol. 79 No. 10
Features
First look: Software program assists contractors with 811 process
By Corinna Hunt, Contributing Editor
(UI) — Earlier this year, my husband and I had a fence replaced, and we failed to call 811 before the workers began digging. We didn’t even think about it – and we’re not the only ones.
“A lot of people don’t really think about it when they’re doing the jobs,” said Josh Heller, creator of 811Assist. “Guys doing directional drilling, landscaping, fences – you hit one service to a house and that could cost you anywhere between a thousand to a couple thousand dollars, and then whatever profit they had on that job is gone.”
811Assist is a new service designed to help contractors that do any type of digging or excavation work by managing all state-required 811 calls and locate tickets for jobs – an idea that was planted through Heller’s own directional drilling company, AM Underground Group.
“I hired a young lady who worked for me for a while, and all she was in charge of doing was submitting tickets, following up, checking the status and everything else,” Heller said. “When we started implementing this – because we did a test run — her concern was, ‘Well, what am I going to do?’ It allowed her to free up time to deal with other day to day issues.”
There’s nothing else quite like 811Assist on the market for contractors, Heller said.
Designed to be user-friendly, 811Assist’s website – with iOS and Android apps currently in development – allows users to easily find and see at-a-glance the status of all locate tickets related to the project at-hand. Contractors can manage their refreshes and non-responses themselves, or 811Assist can take care of tickets from start to finish in the capacity of a liaison between the client and the local 811 service.
“We can just submit them originally and they can follow through on them, or we can take them all the way to a ticket being 100-percent clear on the local 811 call website,” Heller said.
However, 811Assist does not go out into the field to guarantee that the local 811 service has come to physically mark the site. And, the company does rely on, for example, a contractor or customer to let them know if painted markings were mowed over, washed away by rain and now need to be redone, he said.
“We’re able to do it for any state that signs up for us,” Heller said.
Real time
811Assist updates the status of tickets in real time, so once a ticket is closed out, 811Assist’s website will automatically refresh the status to reflect that the next time a user logs in, Heller said. No tickets will be removed from the site unless the user chooses to do so.
Everything stays in one central location, Heller said. “So, if employees leave or move on, and they were the ones in charge of it, you’ll still be able to find all the records they had.”
So far, feedback has been good.
“We’ve had positive feedback from almost 30 different states,” Heller said. “Everybody says it’s a great idea.”
One of those was Rob Manthei, who visited with Heller about 811Assist earlier this year and is now part of the team, promoting the service to potential clients.
“I worked for CNH Industrial for 40 years and talked to a lot of different contractors throughout my career, and safety’s the No. 1 priority with these contractors,” Manthei said. “811 Assist does promote a lot of safety aspects, and so I felt it was important to spread the word about how it is required that 811 has to be called prior to any type of digging. 811 Assist is designed to be your ticket management partner. This is a service that contractors can use to make this part of their job easier.”
The website is available 24/7, and the company aims to be particularly responsive to customers’ needs, with several different ways to get in touch, including an office line, a live chat and email. People are more than welcome to reach out with any questions, Heller added.
“We also have the ability to communicate in Spanish,” Manthei said, and there is a Spanish-language version of the website.
Overall, what makes 811Assist so valuable for the customer is that, through the offerings of project and ticket management and centralized recordkeeping, it offers the added benefits of time management, safety, more streamlined production and damage prevention.
“Those are things in the real world that supervisors see a very big benefit in,” Manthe stressed.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
811Assist, (913) 318-4610, https://811assist.com/en (English), https://811assist.com/es (Español)
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