One week after Joshua Herbison joined PHP Commercial Painting as Chief Technology Officer, the company today began taking a closer look at the technology employees use every day and what will need to change as PHP continues to grow.
In technology meetings held today, October 15, 2024, the team focused on a central problem: PHP has several useful systems, but they do not work together as one coordinated environment.
Employees moved between the company’s business-management platform, Zoom and a separate internal chat system. Each product handled a different part of the work, creating a fragmented experience for employees and making information more difficult to manage.
The Need for Better Access Controls
The existing business-management platform also did not provide the level of role-based access control PHP needed.
Employees require different information depending on their responsibilities. An estimator, project manager, supervisor and painter do not need identical access to company information. PHP needed a system capable of giving each person the information required to perform the job while keeping unrelated business information properly restricted.
That concern helped move the conversation beyond simply reconfiguring the company’s existing software. PHP began looking at replacing the current collection of systems with a platform designed around the company’s own workflows.
“We needed to start immediately looking at replacing the current system with something geared toward exactly what PHP Commercial Painting needed,” Herbison said.
Owner John Morris supported beginning that process because PHP employees and managers had already experienced challenges with the existing technology.
Rethinking How Employees Clock In
Employee timekeeping provided one of the clearest examples of a process that needed improvement.
At the time, employees could clock in by calling a telephone number. The system could recognize whether an employee was associated with a jobsite in the system, but it could not adequately confirm that the employee was at the specific project where that person was scheduled to work.
PHP wanted a more dependable way to connect each clock-in with the employee’s assigned jobsite.
Herbison’s first concept was not a mobile application. It was a text-message system.
An employee would receive a text message containing a secure link to a PHP website. When the employee opened the link, the webpage would request permission to use the phone’s location. The system could then compare that location with the employee’s scheduled project and determine whether the person was within the approved distance of the correct jobsite.
The idea was straightforward: use technology employees already carried in their pockets, require as few steps as possible and make time records more closely reflect what was happening in the field.
A Focused Beginning
The initial plan was intentionally limited.
PHP was not yet outlining the large technology platform the company might eventually need. The immediate priorities were secure and job-specific timekeeping, better internal communication and basic job management.
Those early meetings established an important direction. Instead of adding another disconnected application, PHP would begin exploring technology built around the way a commercial painting contractor actually operates.
The company still had many questions to answer. It needed to understand what information each employee required, how office and field teams communicated, what project details needed to be available and which existing processes should be preserved or redesigned.
As of today, PHP has made its first decision: the company will begin planning a more connected, secure and practical technology foundation shaped around its own needs.