It’s just so much more manageable now. Field Materials AI has made a huge difference for us.
Founded in 1981, Action Mechanical has grown into one of the largest and most trusted mechanical contractors in Arkansas and the surrounding regions. With headquarters in Barling and additional offices in Rogers, Jonesboro, Maumelle, and Tulsa, the company has built its reputation on delivering high-quality mechanical services.
With most projects modeled in detail and prefabricated in-house, the company depends on highly accurate bills of materials and fast, reliable purchasing processes. As the company was continuously growing, Action Mechanical needed a procurement system that could help streamline the process of creating a high volume of purchase orders.
As the only corporate buyer in the company, Field Materials AI has been a game changer for me!
Action Mechanical used Quickbooks Desktop to handle POs, which was not well-suited for high-volume materials purchasing. Amy, who handled purchasing, had to manually create purchase orders. She entered line by line item descriptions, quantities, units of measurement, and unit prices. Some of the company’s prefabrication POs were large and complex, making the manual data entry process time-consuming and prone to human errors.
The company’s CAD and prefabrication practices produced detailed bills of materials that required accuracy in purchasing. However, their existing process could not efficiently handle this data. Bills of materials exported from CAD into Excel still required significant manual cleanup before orders could be placed. When requesting or entering vendor quotes, Amy had to type each line item, which took hours. As the company continued to grow and the job volume increased, it became increasingly hard to keep up with existing procurement practices.
Bills of materials produced by our CAD system and then imported to Excel still required copying, pasting, and reformatting before materials could be ordered.
After implementing FM construction procurement software, Action Mechanical has transformed its purchasing practice. Everything is orders of magnitude faster because of the automation of manual data entry. While Stratus serves as the fabrication software used to create bills of materials, Field Materials handles all procurement tasks. Amy quickly imports the bill of materials into Field Materials and no longer needs to type every item one at a time. Instead, she can now instantly create purchase orders from the bill of materials.
FM construction procurement software also streamlined creating purchase orders from vendor quotes. Amy simply drags and drops a vendor quote PDF into Field Materials and the AI reads its content and instantly creates an itemized cost-coded purchase order. Whether ordering from the job’s bill of materials or from a supplier quote, the process is now dramatically faster.
Receiving orders at the fabrication shop has also dramatically improved. When an order is delivered by the supplier, the shop crew takes a photo of the packing slip using the mobile app. The AI automatically matches the packing slip to the corresponding purchase order, identifies received items and pre-fills received quantities. This ensures visibility across the company and helps catch vendor errors quickly. Even the vendors that work with Action Mechanical have praised the clarity and ease of using Field Materials.
As the only corporate buyer in the company, Field Materials AI has been a game changer for me!
Before Field Materials, Action Mechanical’s purchasing relied on tedious manual entry that slowed down fabrication and procurement. Now the company uses AI to instantly create purchase orders from supplier quote documents and automate processing of packing slips.
