Walter J. Barnes Electric Co.

Walter J. Barnes Electric Co. is a New Orleans–based electrical contractor serving the Gulf South across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Its work spans industrial projects; public works such as water and wastewater treatment plants, pump stations, drainage facilities, and sector gates; and transportation infrastructure, including roadway lighting, traffic signalization, and movable bridges and controls. For years, the company's project managers struggled to pull usable job cost data from its accounting system. Since adopting ProNovos, nearly every project manager uses it daily; the team saves a couple of days each month, and data errors get caught before they cause problems.

The Challenge: Data That Was There, But Hard to Use

Walter J. Barnes Electric has run on their current accounting software since 2004, and it remains the company's trusted system of record for accounting. The challenge was getting that data into the hands of the people running jobs. Project managers needed a faster, more visual way to see their numbers, and without one, they relied on the data less than they could have. 

Exporting the data into spreadsheets was possible, but it created its own burden. Someone had to pull the reports, format them, and distribute them to each project manager. The same held true for tracking change orders and for any analysis the team wanted to run. "It was just a lot of work," Michael Ellis, President said.

The Solution: Job Financials Built for Project Managers

ProNovos builds on the data in Foundation Software and presents it in a format project managers and field supervisors can use every day. Foundation remains the system of record, and ProNovos gives the team running the jobs a direct view into it. Adoption came almost immediately.

WIP and cost projections quickly became the centerpiece. Project managers now track how their jobs are trending and compare their projections against actual performance as the job progresses. ProNovos has become their primary tool for tracking and forecasting jobs. That shift supports a larger company priority, since forecasting has received far more focus and attention over the past couple of years.

"They can see what their projections are versus reality over time and get a better handle on the overall job finances than they were able to before."

The team also leans on a core set of dashboards. Billings serves as a monthly double-check to confirm customers are billed correctly and nothing is underbilled. Project Data Health, which flags data entry errors and anomalies, has been customized to the team's needs. The Change Order function helps keep change order process organized alongside the job financials. But WIP and cost projections remain the heart of it.

"We probably the WIP function and the cost projection function the most out of anything."

The Results

Time back every month. Michael adds up the manual work ProNovos replaced: exporting and formatting job cost reports, managing and organizing change orders, and pulling data out for analysis. Across everyone who did that work, he estimates the savings at a couple of days per month, or roughly a month of workdays over a year.

Project managers who know their numbers. Beyond easier access to data, Michael points to a bigger change. Over the past few years, project managers have become far more fluent in the financials of their own jobs. That fluency has sharpened forecasting and strengthened the company's WIP reviews, which happen formally once a month and informally about every week and a half.

"It's improved our forecasting, and it's improved our regular WIP projections… It's very much improved that whole process."

Data the team trusts. Project Data Health works as a safety net. On new jobs, it catches key-in errors in the initial contract amount and budget, such as an extra zero or a 3 entered as an 8. On active jobs, it flags forecasting issues such as double-counted costs so that the team can correct them far faster than before.

"It helps those anomalies jump out, and we're able to catch them pretty quickly. We have a lot of confidence in the data now."

Lessons that feed the next bid. Because WIP reviews show what drives a job to beat or miss expectations, those insights now flow back to estimating. When a problem keeps recurring, estimators build in cost to cover it. Where the team consistently beats projections, estimators can tighten their numbers.

The Bottom Line

For Walter J. Barnes Electric, ProNovos turned job cost data from something project managers worked around into the tool they use daily. The result is sharper forecasts, cleaner data, and a team that understands the financial side of every job it runs.

"ProNovos lets us do more than we could before. We're more on top of our jobs financially, and more in tune with them, than we've ever been."
— Michael Ellis, President