It’s a tall town

As that story shows, Elkins and his company are, and have been, tightly tied to Midland. In fact, the company took its name from what was once a slogan for Midland – “The Tall City.” That name stemmed from the fact that, at one time, Midland boasted one of the few very tall (37-storey) Texas buildings outside of Dallas and Houston.

Over time, things changed. The old-timers left; the younger oil money chose to build their megabuck homes out-of-state.  Tall City Electric rolled with those punches, moving on from custom residential to commercial and industrial.

Elkins and his people worked on truck service outfits, machine shops, we did one or two boys’ prisons. "We did a lot of schools. We even worked for Exxon on a project, the remodel of a seven-storey building. We worked for big retail chains – I’ve done a lot of mall work. We’ve probably done 40 or 50 stores out at the mall,” he remembered. 

Another memory: “Exxon bought all my equipment for me on one job -- a Greenlee Super Tugger, benders, all the heavy gear – the things we needed to do their job.”

What’s going on these days? Tall City is working on a Mercedes-Benz dealer’s building, remodeling a health care center, and wiring some Salvation Army stores.

Putting the system to work

Elkins relies on the McCormick software to help him win profitable work.

“Originally, I had another computer system, one of the earlier ones. But in 1982 we added PC Scale from McCormick,” Elkins said. “We’ve since moved up to the Win 6000 system, of course – but we still have PC Scale at work for us. Our field guys use it for jobs of $1,500 or maybe $2,000.”

And while Tall City is in its 4th decade, it still is willing to put new technological options to work. Recently, Elkins brought On-Screen Takeoff into his company, with the automated tie-in to his McCormick estimating software.

“I’m into about the 12th job we’ve done with it right now and, I tell you, I wished we had had this years ago. I can remember one hospital job on which we kept getting revisions, and we kept finding new stuff that they were adding to the job – without telling us,” Elkins remembers.

“That wouldn’t have happened if we had this back then.”

Going one step further, Elkins has become some kind of Texas evangelist for McCormick’s software. He noted that several of those former employees who went into the electrical contracting business didn’t automatically start up their separate companies with the software in place.

“These young men would go into business, and on their first bids they’d be so dadgum low. They could not possibly make money at the prices they were quoting. It was pretty obvious they would not have been that low had they taken a systematic approach to estimating,” Elkins said.

“That’s when I’d tell them that they needed to use estimating software, and about my experience with McCormick.”

There’s Still Time To Register
For ’11 User’s Conference

Reminder: McCormick Systems’ annual User’s Conference is happening beginning March 30 (pre-conference educational session begin March 28) in Scottsdale AZ.

See schedule below. To register, please call 800-444-4890.

Powerful guest speaker topic: Productivity!

Project Doc Control – President Jeff Burmeister of this three-year-old company actually has 12 years of experience with the 15-year-old Project Doc Control product (which once was known as Autodesk Subcontractor). Burmeister works with electrical contractors on a regular basis and is familiar with the McCormick audience; he has appeared previously at our events,
            Burmeister will describe how contractors can automate their keeping and tracking of all the e-mails, RFIs, responses to the responses, and modified documents that each and every significant project generates. On occasion, perhaps you’ve found the 5th e-mail on a particular key item . . . but not the 3rd one on that specific issue; such missing information can hurt you.
            With Project Doc Control, once you set up this system for your project, that won’t happen (not during the project and not later, should legal issues develop that make it vital that you locate specific documents).
            According to Burmeister, take the proper action (turn on “archiving”) with his system, and – even if you clean out a file folder on your computer where you last saw a given important document . . . you’ll not only still have the item you suddenly find yourself needing, you’ll be able to find it (via a “link” created with one or another of the associated documents).
            Project Doc Control now has 500-plus installations in North America; Burmeister estimates that roughly half are electrical, mechanical, or plumbing contractors; perhaps more than 100 ECs use this system.
            Additionally, of course, his system works hand-in-hand with McCormick’s estimating software.

BIM Solutions – unlike the three suppliers above, this company – which offers expertise in CAD and BIM – will this year make its debut at a McCormick Systems’ User’s Conference.
            [We learned about the company from one of our contractors, who works closely with BIM Solutions.]
            “We work with electrical contractors, engineers, and others to help them learn to use BIM, and to work with them to integrate the technology into how they work on projects,” explained Bette Quan, partner and regional sales manager for the two-year-old company.
            Essentially, as she explained it, BIM Solutions can become the strong right arm of an electrical contracting company that’s not yet thoroughly familiar – or even comfortable – with BIM. “We do production work for them. We can help them with building design. We can work with the contractor on scheduling. We can help them take BIM all the way through to the facility manager,” Quan said.
            As of a recent conversation, BIM Solutions had worked with “at least 10” electrical contractors, she said. “At the McCormick Systems conference, we’ll explain to the electrical contractors how they can get into BIM. They’ll learn how they can integrate their needs, using BIM, into a given project.”
            Scott Elliott, also a partner at the company, will explain how BIM Solutions does “media work” for contractors. That’s about using the 3D models – animated, so to speak – to demonstrate (to owners, for example) how the contractor will do the electrical work and what it will mean for the completed building.
            “We work with contractors on how to use BIM to construct winning bids,” Quan said. “We can help a contractor use the BIM model to save money, and to reduce the amount of re-work that might be needed.”

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