October 24, 2023

Mechanical Trades Choose Procurement with Kojo

Kojo founder Maria Davidson presents at SMACNA 2023

The nation's leading procurement and inventory management platform is growing rapidly with mechanical contractors. Over 75 mechanical contractors now use Kojo to manage material procurement. They're realizing significant gains from our all-in-one materials management platform, and you can too. 

Expanding Across Mechanical Trades 

Kojo’s vision is to make it faster, easier, and more sustainable to build the world around us. Our mission is to give you control over the materials procurement and management process.

By connecting field, office, warehouse, shop, accounting, and vendor teams on one platform, Kojo gives you visibility into real-time materials spending and usage, helps you source the best prices and availability across vendors, reduces material waste, and increases labor productivity. 

Our journey began in 2018 as the electrical contractor industry’s first procurement platform that connected field and the office to match invoices, simplify purchase orders, and manage inventory. Last fall we closed a $39 million Series C fund raise and we’ve received various awards including the Best SaaS Product for the Construction Industry award. This year, Kojo has also also been named as a Top Tech Firm by Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) as we've begun to serve the material procurement needs of a growing number of mechanical contractors.

Over the past two years alone, Kojo has seen a 12x increase in users and saved customers more than $19 million on their materials orders.

“With Kojo, I can see everything from the time we ordered through receiving, invoicing, and payment, all in one system. Kojo makes it easier for me to back up our data and catch mistakes before we pay for them. " -Alex, Tharco, Inc., A Kojo Mechanical Customer

2023 SMACNA Annual Convention

Kojo's CEO and Founder Maria Davidson presented Improving Procurement to Improve Your Books & Margins at the 2023 Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association conference. Here, she's detailing how current procurement processes cost contractors millions of dollars per year:

  • Planning & Forecasting -- Only 52% of contractors use BOMs for planning and managing purchases.
  • Requisitions / Purchasing -- Avgerage overhead cost to process a single PO is $68.
  • Quoting -- 48% of purchases go unquoted, and there is a 5-20% price variation between vendors.
  • Receiving / Deliveries -- 48% of deliveries aren’t reported to the office.
  • Invoices / Payments -- 11% of invoices have billing errors, while a $50M contractor spends 20+ hours per week reconciling invoices.
Improving Procurement presentation by Maria Davidson, Kojo founder
Kojo Founder Maria Davidson Presents at SMACNA 2023

How Mechanical Contractors Excel with Kojo

Like our electrical customers, mechanical customers are seeing great success with Kojo. The Mechanical Contractor's Guide to Overcoming Supply Chain Challenges helps address your unique issues, and here are a number of other ways we streamline your materials procurement process:

Bill of Materials (BOM)

Kojo makes it easy to add your BOM for easy ordering and field releasing. You can add any phase code or code code needed, even custom columns.

Mechanical Catalog

We know there are many nicknames for parts out there and this can create confusion for communication between the field and office. Kojo has a preset catalog field users can order from that even supports slang terms for easy field to office part name translation.

Mechanical Quick Order

Like the name suggests, field users can request an item quickly with just a few taps. Mechanical customers can select from common plumbing and HVAC items for rapid ordering.

Warehousing & Fabrication Management

Surface your warehouse inventory to field teams for cost reduction before buying the same items again. You can setup inventory locations for your warehouse stock and for your fabrication shop. 

“Kojo’s inventory tracking allows us to focus on buying more of the items that move the fastest, so we are using our valuable space effectively and we aren’t sitting on inventory that isn’t getting used.” -Alex, Tharco, Inc., A Kojo Mechanical Customer

Integrated Tool Tracking

Additionally, Kojo's seamlessly integrated platform has added Tool Tracking allowing you to track the status, availability and lifecycle of each tool.

Trusted Industry Partners

The Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association (SMACNA) has more than 4,500 members. Kojo has ongoing partnerships with SMACNA. If you’d like us to come out and speak at your local chapter, let us know! This growing partnership has also produced 7 Steps to Better Procurement in concert with Kojo. The Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA) has also partnered with Kojo to both address industry education and efficiency. Learn more about this productive partnership from MCAA’s Virtual Trade Show.

We also partner with mechanical distributors such as Ferguson and Hajoca. We are building out integrations with Ferguson and Hajoca so that in addition to our automated RFQ and ordering process, customers can get live pricing and availability data within Kojo. 

Now that you are in on the secret, you can see there is no better time than now to reduce costs and increase productivity with Kojo.

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