Parspec Delivers 50% Time Savings for CED’s Projects Team

• Challenge: The outdated submittal process at CED’s San Francisco location was hampering project operations and hindering the company’s ability to increase demand.
• Outcome: CED San Francisco’s project management team was able to increase its capacity by 50% and reduce dependency on vendors by leveraging Parspec’s solution to streamline the submittal process, improving profitability and providing an edge in a competitive market.

Challenges

As a top lighting distributor, CED manages a high volume of submittals – but their outdated process was straining operations and taking a toll on company profits.

The projects team managed their submittals “the old-fashioned way” for a long time, according to Eli Bassett, Assistant Manager at CED. But they’d reach a breaking point with the tool Submittal123, which lacked the necessary features to keep up with company demand.

“It’s a little bit archaic. It’s not very intuitive,” said Bassett. “Because the database is very limited, it didn’t do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.”

The process of manually tracking down cut sheets and uploading information was time-consuming and it introduced room for user error. In search of better solutions, CED built their own database of cut sheets, but it quickly became too challenging to maintain.

Bassett’s team began to search for new solutions that would allow them to better leverage their team’s time, building demand and revenue for the company.

Solution

After a successful two-week trial, CED chose Parspec for its comprehensive cut sheet database and intuitive features that deliver a faster, seamless documentation process.

After years of losing time tracking down cut sheets and adding their own mark-ups and branding, the projects team immediately saw value in Parspec’s solution.

“When our users got their hands on it, they were swayed,” said Bassett. “For the first time, we didn’t have to go digging through our own static database to try to find product information.” 

CED leverages Parspec’s dynamic database to quickly find product documentation. In addition, annotations can be made with a single click by leveraging Parspec’s AI-powered suggestions. “It is genuinely saving us an immense amount of time”, says Bassett.

CED is now fulfilling requests faster from internal product managers, speeding up submittals and satisfying stakeholders, with Parspec’s unique features:

• Comprehensive product database providing access to over one million cut sheets sourced daily from over 1,800 manufacturer websites.

• Automated generation of standard elements, such as branded headers, and tables of contents that saves time and creates consistency across documentation.

• Quality control workflows “The mark-up features create a better QA/QC process,” says Jack Warner, Project Manager at CED. “This helps us ensure a solid submittal package for the client.”

Results

Parspec cut CED’s submittal creation time in half, freeing up the team to drive additional demand, and generate higher revenue per employee at the profit-sharing company.

“You work with your sales team to build the demand, but you also have to have the capacity to meet the demand,” says Bassett. “With Parspec, project managers today can cut reduce their time spent on submittals by 50%, which makes CED more profitable.”

CED’s team in Central Ohio also uses Parspec, with Project Manager Luke Kerber finding significant time savings and better standardization. “With Parspec, we can complete submittals in half the time. We no longer have to rely on vendors to complete submittals, which usually takes much longer and is sometimes incorrect. One of the best features is the uniformity that Parspec enables across our company with the submittal creation process and the final product.”

To maximize benefits across the team, Bassett plans to continue onboarding new project managers. As a privately held profit-sharing company, CED prioritizes cost savings and efficient use of time. “It’s our goal to achieve the highest profit sharing per person,” he says.

Bassett says that because many distributors are unwilling to adopt new technology and improve their processes, using Parspec makes them more competitive.

“With Parspec at our disposal, we’re more efficient than competitors doing it the old way. That means I can go out there and capture market share. That’s my competitive edge.”