Einheit Electric saves up to 20% on material costs with Kojo

Einheit Electric’s rapid growth made it challenging and complex to manage the growing number of material requests, quotes, and purchases needed to keep every job on track and within budget. Material information and updates were transferred between the field, office, and vendors over the phone, email, text messages, and paper documents. A lack of visibility across the team made it hard to manage the flow of materials, leading to costly mistakes that slowed jobs down. 

For Einheit’s field teams, a lack of visibility of material order statuses made it hard for them to plan their jobs accordingly and know when and what materials to request. They also had a hard time keeping up with when materials would be delivered. Over the course of a job, too much of their time was spent managing materials, rather than building. 

Back in the office, the rapid growth made it hard for John and his office to keep up with all the requisitions coming in from different jobs. The time-intensive process of sifting through documents, emails, and text messages was unscalable. It led to Einheit’s team skipping out on getting material quotes from vendors and missing out on significant cost savings, ultimately eating into their bottom line.

John knew that their processes - or lack thereof - had to improve for the company to continue growing. He wanted a technology that would give the company better visibility into the entire procurement process and help automate manual tasks like sourcing quotes from vendors.

When John saw Kojo, he knew it would be the solution to unlocking continued growth for his business. In his own words, “Kojo is what every contractor has been waiting to have for 50 years.”

After a smooth implementation of Kojo, he and his team - from the field to the office - now had a central system to purchase, manage, and track the flow of their materials from the start of a job to completion. Today, all their requisitions, RFQs, and POs are processed through Kojo’s digital procurement platform. Large delivery orders get logged into the platform as well, allowing Einheit to have confidence that they’re paying for what they received and improving their ability to track what they’ve used and spent throughout the job. 

The impact on his office team has been significant. Tedious, manual tasks, such as combing through emails and documents to interpret field requisitions and find vendor pricing has been cut down by 50%. “We’re able to see in real-time what we should be getting charged for, what the price should be, and what was backordered. We’re able to catch mistakes a lot quicker than we used to be,” said John. 

The extra time gained in the office, combined with Kojo’s RFQ feature - which automates the RFQ process by sending digital requests for price and availability to vendors - allows Einheit to find up to 20% on certain material purchases. As John put it, “If you're not out there shopping for your material, you're losing money. I would say just sending [an RFQ] out we’re saving 10- 20%.”

Kojo is now embedded into Einheit’s materials workflow. “Kojo is the day-to-day workhorse. I always stress to my foremen - ‘all orders go through Kojo.’ If [they] need material picked up, put it in Kojo so there's a digital record of the request for material to be picked up on this day at this time.”

With Kojo, Einheit has been able to continue its rapid growth by finding real cost savings on its projects and streamlining its procurement processes.