Tristan here - taking a break this week and passing the 🎤 to my friend Luke Powers, CEO of Gearflow.

Luke’s built something special for fleet and equipment teams in the construction world - and he’s here to talk about what AI means for procurement and where this shift is headed. Contractors spend millions on parts and equipment, but the workflows are still stuck in the past. Luke makes the case for why that’s about to change. Enjoy! 😎

Guest Author:

Luke Powers, CEO of Gearflow

I might be stating the obvious, but dirt contractors consume a lot of parts, equipment, and tools every day in order to do their work. Hence, their jobs depend on the fleet team to get it done quickly and for the best value. Today, the process in which these crucial services to the job are being fulfilled are manual, tedious, and costly. Add to that, procurement is typically done on a reactive basis with no visibility.

What would it mean to contracting companies’ bottom line to transform their entire procurement process? Streamlining the process could gain immediate workflow efficiencies, improved service levels, and cost optimization. But most importantly, by capturing and centralizing their data, they can now use it.

Visualizing previously-unknowable procurement data is a powerful thing if revenue producing jobs depend on procurement. The basics are twofold:

1. Having a clear timeline of events on every order, and

2. Highlighting areas to improve across the team, fleet, and vendors.

However, what would revolutionize the nature of procurement is incorporating artificial intelligence. Yet AI remains highly dependent on the contextual data it is fed. Meaning the more procurement data is fed by fleet teams, the better it will perform. And the more data it analyses, the more tasks it can automate and more insightful responses it can give.

But before discussing the dream state, I’d like to ground ourselves in the present. In what is happening today. Two examples I see often when talking with fleet teams:

Parts procurement generally takes an average of 3-8 days from the moment it’s needed to the moment it’s at the machine due to many manual steps in the process:

• Part request from the mechanic → internal review/approval → dealer coordination → alternate options coordination → parts received → parts installed

Dispatching equipment generally takes 3-5 days before the machine is needed at the job, also due to many manual steps:

• Equipment request from someone at the job → internal review → if available, owned machine dispatched to job → if no owned equipment is available, requests sent out to multiple vendors for price/availability → vendor selected → machine manually checked in on job site → machine manually checked out on call off

For both parts and equipment dispatch:

• Any order status updates need to be given manually with no centralized visibility.

• All pertinent information must be manually entered in a CMMS and accounting software for each order.

• If there are any issues with the order, rinse and repeat the process.

What if we could turn the first bullet in both workflow examples to a near-instant process at each step, plus automate the bottom three bullets? As consumers, we take for granted just how much control we have over our own purchasing decisions at our fingertips. All major and minor retail purchasing decisions come with easily comparing the options, and can be immediately executed upon.

Yet retail e-commerce does not work for construction procurement as the nature of the transactions require more thought and team coordination. However, the experience and ease of transaction should feel about the same while leveraging AI to drive new levels of productivity and insights.

What would need to be true in order to make it happen?

At Gearflow, we obsess over that question.

Forward-thinking fleet teams are leveraging Gearflow to drive unprecedented cost savings, workflow efficiencies, and visibility into their parts procurement process. AI is used natively through the app today to:

• Make daily recommendations for what parts might need to be on hand by learning from previous transactions.

• Ingest parts manuals to turn static, long PDFs into usable, 3D exploded diagrams with clickable individual parts and the ability to zoom in/out for mechanics.

• Ingest vendor quotes, invoices, or receipts automatically to read the text and infer part numbers, descriptions, quantity, and cost. Give mechanics the ability to talk-to-text to describe the parts they need by which machine.

And this is just the beginning. Parts is the first procurement category we are building and are excited about what customers are asking for next.

In the future, AI will proactively alert contractors on areas or trends they may want to address across their procurement landscape. And contractors will be able to ask AI questions like, “Where is my team spending too much time? Where can we save costs? Who is my most impactful supplier? How could we reduce costs?” The AI will have the context of that fleet’s data and the context of the wider community on the platform to give informed, useful answers.

My favorite part of the job is sitting down with leaders of the contracting companies building America, and we’re thrilled to play a small role in making it happen. If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to learn about you, your company, and your goals for this year.

Tristan, thank you for this opportunity. Edgevanta is a great partner!

Luke Powers

Co-founder & CEO, Gearflow

[email protected] 

630-780-7500

About Luke

Luke Powers is the founder and CEO of Gearflow, launched in 2018 in Chicago. Gearflow is the only AI-driven parts procurement platform designed for self-perform contractors to keep their equipment running and maintenance budgets low. Gearflow enables mechanics, purchasers, and vendors to coordinate in real time to drive 6X faster parts fulfillment times and six figure savings on parts costs. 

Prior to starting Gearflow, Luke began his career at a leading logistics technology company, Echo Global Logistics, as an Enterprise Sales Director. He then helped lead his family business, the nation’s largest wholesale equipment rental company, USM ReRents, to 3X revenue in 6 years.

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About the Author

Tristan Wilson is the CEO and Founder of Edgevanta. We make software that helps contractors win more work at the right price. He is a 4th Generation Contractor, construction enthusiast, ultra runner, and bidding nerd. He worked his way up the ladder at Allan Myers in the Mid-Atlantic and his family’s former business Barriere Construction before starting Edgevanta in Nashville, where the company is based. Reach out to him at [email protected]