SESCO Cuts Submittal Turnaround Time in Half with Parspec

• Challenge: SESCO needed to accelerate their submittal process across its large team of reps while maintaining quality and consistency.
• Outcome: SESCO reduced the time and cost of submittal creation by 50% with Parspec. In 2023, SESCO expects a 3x return on investment in labor savings.

Challenges

SESCO needed to improve the speed and quality of their submittal process to build stronger customer relationships and improve the bottom line.

For SESCO agents, creating lighting submittals has historically been laborious and time-consuming. “The whole submittal process was fraught with inefficiency,” says Netesh Gohil, VP of Operations at SESCO. “Our agents constantly needed to access and use the latest cut sheets from hundreds of manufacturers – spending hours on the creation of a PDF versus the value-critical task of validating the Bill of Materials against the fixture schedule.”

Before switching to Parspec, the agents were using Submittal123 to find and organize cut sheets. Missing or incomplete information often forced them to manually search for the right specs and upload them. They then had to transfer the submittal to a PDF editor for annotation.

Complicating things further, manufacturers frequently updated their data sheets, making it almost impossible for agents to keep track of all the changes across thousands of products. This resulted in a large workload of administrative tasks and the potential for errors or out-of-date specs that could take a toll on client relationships.

Gohil knew that something had to change, but with a large team across multiple branches, he required a solution that was easy to use and quick to learn and adopt.

Solution

By collaborating with Parspec, SESCO replaced a set of disconnected tools with a comprehensive solution that saves time, eliminates costly errors, and facilitates easy adoption by users across locations.

Gohil chose Parspec because it provided a comprehensive submittal solution for his agents. After signing, Gohil worked closely with Parspec’s customer service team to facilitate a successful implementation for hundreds of users.

“I definitely wondered, ‘How quickly can we train people? Will there be resistance?’” said Gohil. “Parspec put those fears to rest. Between its customer service team and the features within the tool to help adoption, specifically the chat communication, Parspec overcame that hurdle pretty quickly. My expectations were not only met, they were exceeded.”

SESCO utilizes Parspec’s unique features to speed up their submittal process, including its:

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

• Automated part number entry and annotations, reducing the number of manual tasks and risk of error.

• Cloud-based document hosting and sharing, enabling teams to collaborate internally in real-time and receive notifications when customers have viewed or downloaded submittal packages.

Results

Parspec was successfully adopted by 124 users across 23 locations in only three months, enabling SESCO to turn high-quality submittals around in half the time.

Agents across the country quickly adapted to the platform, and SESCO saw decreased active time per submittal within months, says Gohil.

Parspec’s intuitive UI also made it easier for less technical staff to complete submittals.

“The work is very specialized and Parspec gives me the ability to make it more generalized so that other less-technical staff can do it,” says Gohil. “It can be faster, more responsive, but still have that look and finish that’s polished like it came from a specialist.”

Parspec has also improved alignment between users who create submittals and those who review and observe the process.

In the future, SESCO is excited about the potential for Parspec to fundamentally change their business process around submittals, including how they measure the entire customer lifecycle.