Brubacher Excavating in Bowmansville, PA has approximately 350 employees and offers a full range of excavating, pipe and utility installation, roadway construction and general earth moving to residential development, municipal and industrial customers, large commercial contractors and landfills and golf courses. The company has a drilling and blasting division as well that services customers in eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey.

In 2003 Brubacher Excavating decided something needed to be done to address several problems that were identified within the blasting division. The blasters were spending approximately two (2) hours per day completing paperwork. The paper-based system they used was very error prone. The information contained in the paperwork was inconsistent and handwriting was often illegible. Also, the information contained in the paperwork needed to be re-entered into other systems such as Accounting or HR in order to generate invoices, payroll checks or reorder supplies. There was often a lag time of days or weeks for this information to get into other systems or to managers. This made the billing process slow and gave managers no time to respond to problems such as projects being behind schedule or over budget. The inventory management system was an additional problem since Brubacher was growing. They had three magazine sites and were involved in moving a lot of material. Keeping accurate records using a paper-based system was getting increasingly difficult and sometimes the month end inventory reconciliation was very time consuming. Managing the flow of inventory and low supplies was reactionary because often information regarding a low or depleted item was not known until it was an emergency need.

Storing and retrieving this paperwork was also becoming problematic. Various regulators, such as the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and others required that these records be kept for years. With the growth of the blasting division and the increasing amount of forms and data that was being collected for each blast, Brubacher was being inundated with paper documents. Keeping these documents organized and quickly finding what the regulators wanted was difficult, sometimes impossible. In addition, this made audits and inspections a fairly painful process.

Since Brubacher Excavating does quite a substantial amount of blasting in highly populated areas, there was always an ever-present risk of being called into court to defend some claim of damage to a homeowner or business. Brubacher took great pride in its record as a very safe and accident-free company.. Their blast process was handled in a very professional manner, however if they were ever called into court, lawyers would go right to the documentation. If this were inconsistent or illegible, the processes and professionalism of Brubacher's blasting division would be called into question. Since the paper-based system was in place, there was always more potential for error and omission. There was no way to validate that what the blasters wrote on a form was correct or that information was not altered for the benefit of the company.

A computer-based system had considerable appeal to Brubacher Excavating for many of the reasons previously discussed. At the time the project began in October 2003 no blast and inventory management system came close to delivering the functionality the Brubacher's blasting division required. As a result Brubacher engaged the services of an web development company that had considerable expertise in document and records management. Brubacher worked closely with a web development company in its area to create a program to meet their needs.

The first step was be closely examine the overlying goals that had to be met in order for the project to be a success. The blasting manager and aggregate manager as well as IT manager and other support staff were all involved in the process of designing and implementing the system from the beginning. In order for this to be successful blasters would need to feel comfortable with the system. Therefore the user interface (UI) design and the workflow (the sequence of displayed screens and forms) would need to be engineered to imitate their current paper process. The new systems needed to take into account all of the nuances and exceptions that occur during the course of the day for the blaster. It needed to be designed to very gracefully handle exceptions that occur in every process. During the many months of development, meetings occurred that revealed new exceptions that occurred in the handling of inventory as well as during the completion of blast reports.

The system was introduced to blasters and put into use in the winter of 2004 after many months of development and testing in the field. The initial response from the blasters was mixed. They were eager to try something that they believed could help them cope with the paperwork but as with any new system training was needed as well as some reinforcement from management that this was the "new" methodology for completing paperwork that must be followed . Some blasters were more comfortable with completing paperwork using computers while others who had no experience with computers required more training and encouragement.

It was important to listen to blasters and support personnel using the newly designed system. Based on their feedback and recommendations, many improvements were made that made it a more user friendly system. Managers at Brubacher Excavating were and continue to be very enthusiastic about the how the system improves many aspects of their blasting operation.