Interstate Electrical Goes Lean with Revu

Interstate Electrical is a regional, family-owned, commercial electrical contractor with offices in all six New England states. Founded in 1966 by Pat Alibrandi and currently led by his son Jim Alibrandi, Interstate aspires to be a different kind of electrical contracting company ─ one where individual talent and determination is encouraged and rewarded and one that is equally customer-centric.

With the firm fully embracing the adoption of lean methodology, Interstate Electrical could no longer rely on paper drawings, emails and spreadsheets for project delivery.

Project information was on paper in non-scalable PDFs, and information flow and accuracy were hindered as drawings were marked and reprinted each time by hand and distributed via paper to project stakeholders.

Estimation was done using a combination of wheel-and-paper process, Microsoft Excel and other software, resulting in a slowed, bulky process that yielded costly errors and rework.

Markups were made on physical drawings and presented problems: there were multiple copies, notes were hard to read and accuracy was not optimal.

Bluebeam Revu was adopted to digitally transform previous software-based workflows.

Bluebeam Studio was utilized for live markup and review collaboration across all project teams to create a singular digital environment.

Features like the Tool Chest, Legends, Overlay Pages and scalable measurement tools within Revu were used to standardize and more accurately represent project information.

• Interstate Electrical has been able to finalize a lean transformation with Revu.
• Revu’s Overlay Pages feature significantly streamlines the process of comparing original contract to change orders.
• Estimation speed and accuracy have improved as a result of using Bluebeam Revu, giving the company the opportunity to control billable hours and profit margins and the ability to bid for more work.
• Templates, the custom Tool Chest and customizable markups in Revu allow team members to accurately display and receive information, regardless of technology experience, which reduces change orders and costly rework.