Industrial5

Industrial5, an engineering consulting firm in the thermal processing market, boosts productivity, accountability, and efficiency with BlueFolder.

Company Overview

Since 2000, Industrial5 has provided consulting services to companies who use thermal processing to strengthen steel. Guided by Industrial5’s expertise, customers increase performance and efficiency of thermal processing, manage equipment lifecycles, and prepare for regulatory audits. Industrial5 consultants also design training programs, help write technical proposals for Department of Defense awards, and prototype custom machine parts. 

The Challenge

A few years ago, Matt Kowalski, founder and principal member of Industrial5, wanted to refine and expand the company’s service offering as a way to attract new contracts and provide more value to existing customers. But at the time, they had no easy way to manage work requests. And with more work, they would need to help every employee focus their time most efficiently. Matt realized that in order to increase revenue, add more services, and maintain quality, they’d need a way to track work orders, contracts, employee assignments, and customer interactions.  

Given the broad range of services they offer, Industrial5 was looking for a simple, flexible tool that would help them manage time, set priorities, update status, and compile expenses and billable hours. They also needed integration with their desktop billing software, QuickBooks®, so they could push job information directly to invoices. Kowalski spent a long time roaming the internet for a solution. 

The Solution

Industrial5 decided to try out BlueFolder, and Kowalski recalls, “We had our entire business loaded into the trial with our customers and functional work orders within the second day of the trial. It was that easy.” They quickly integrated with QuickBooks® and were able to move jobs through the system from submission to invoice.  

As the trial continued, Industrial5 discovered many BlueFolder features that help them increase efficiency and accountability while keeping customer satisfaction high.   

Contract management

BlueFolder’s contract management allows Industrial5 to set a billing limit for individual accounts and alert the team if a job will exceed it. It also signals when the account is ready for renewal, so contracts don’t expire unexpectedly and cause work or billing delays.

Integration with email

With BlueFolder’s email integration, engineers attach messages directly to a job’s record in the system. The team can see customer approvals, requirements, requests, or questions in the same place, which cuts the likelihood of misunderstandings and mistakes. Kowalski especially likes attaching emails to each job because “it also holds my customers accountable. When they reply, I’ve got it in writing in BlueFolder — whatever their decision was.”

Easy search

If Industrial5 employees want details about any job, they can enter key words or other relevant information into BlueFolder’s powerful free-form search engine and find what they need fast.

Calendar integration

Integration with popular business calendars makes it easy to prioritize and focus employee time. When a task is assigned, it shows up in the assignee’s schedule automatically.

Cloud-based access

The Industrial5 team are rarely in an office together. Whether onsite with customers or working remotely, they can access on BlueFolder’s cloud service any time, using any device.

During the trial and after deployment, Industrial5 has found BlueFolder’s support team extremely responsive. Whether they needed help uncovering all the features or had a technical issue, BlueFolder has furnished the answers in a day or two. Plus, as a budget-minded business, Industrial5 affirms BlueFolder’s reasonable price and rich feature set makes it one of the best values in the market. 

The Results

As Kowalski looks back on the last 3 years with BlueFolder he notes, “It’s made our life easier, and it’s helped us to become more disciplined.” Industrial5 has been able to develop the efficiency many growing field service businesses struggle with. They run a weekly audit of their jobs in BlueFolder, and with all the relevant documents in the system, the team easily solves any brewing problems before they impact work. The discipline they’ve developed with the program has made it easier to expand to government contracts which demand detailed accountability.  

Industrial5’s customers are also impressed with BlueFolder. They use the customer portal to get status on any service, invoice, or contract detail. Everything is transparent and open, so customers know how work is progressing any time. Kowalksi observes, “I haven’t had one accountability discussion with them since we started using BlueFolder. There’s never been a question ever about our billing to them.”  He continues, “One of our big customers jumped in and called us up to compliment us on how well we were doing on their projects. Wow. All because they went into their portal and were able to walk through the story that we tell with our record keeping.” 

Industrial5 has come to see BlueFolder as a pivotal tool for helping the company achieve high productivity while maintaining quality and customer satisfaction. In Kowalski’s words, it has a “limitless ability to bend and flex to anybody providing a service. I recommend BlueFolder to partner companies of ours all the time.” 

See what BlueFolder can do for your growing business. Schedule a Product Tour. 

Try a free demo here.