The Hunt Valley Companies , comprised of Hunt Valley Contractors and sibling companies Hunt Valley Distributors and Sparks@Play, was founded as a decorative concrete contractor in Greater Baltimore and the Southeast working in close collaboration with engineers, architects, landscape architects, general contractors, government agencies, and developers to create outdoor and indoor spaces of distinction since 1981.  Their companies expanded with decorative product distribution in 1999 and playgrounds, shelters and site amenities in 2009.  They now provide, in addition to decorative concrete services, full service design and construction of playground projects, which often include elaborate, custom playgrounds, pavilions, shelters, and trellis or pergola structures.  The expansion into these areas and melding of products and services offered created growth, but also challenges in restructuring bidding and project management.

Challenges

• Very complex bidding process that involves multiple partners and contractors at various stages of their construction projects
• No uniform quote proposal or project management process. HVC lacked a single point of visibility for project scope, partners, potential products, labor and structure component pricing.
• Project management was on an ad hoc basis, collecting & reviewing crucial decision making data through multiple channels, with varying degrees of information

Solution

• Hunt Valley Contractors Purchased salesforce.com in 2014
• BlackIron Group assisted HVC in deploying the Sales Cloud
• Data was migrated from various sources, yielding one centralized database of information
• A robust, uniquely customized Conga (mail merge) integration now allows for single and multi-tiered proposals to be generated for one or multiple project partners. The proposal documents are generated by clicking a custom button, and are stored in one location, available to all decision makers
• Workflow rules keep all decision makers informed of the projects progress and next steps required
• Phase II’s custom Visual Force integration for Products and associated Labor and Materials Tasks drives tremendous visibility into projects’ costs, profit margins and provides streamlined data resource allocation to complete projects

Future

• HVC, Inc is scheduling Phase III with The BlackIron Group to deploy a Project Tracking function in the salesforce.com tool, leveraging existing Product and Project task data to manage ongoing Projects
• Using base salesforce.com Platform, Custom Visual Force programming, AppExchange tools Conga, DropBox and other Employee management apps, HVC, Inc is developing streamlined decision making processes to manage the internal and external resources necessary to drive successful project execution

“BIG was a great partner through the process of personalizing SF. We were able to convey our sales process for each of our companies and BIG was able to make it work as a cohesive system. This gave us one place for all contacts, accounts, and opportunities allowing management to quickly review the details regardless of the company.”

– Isaac Sparks, Vice President, Hunt Valley Companies