An Hour and a Half Back, Every Day: The Seaway Plumbing Story

About Seaway Plumbing

Seaway Plumbing has served Key Largo, the Upper Florida Keys, Homestead, and Miami since 2002, building a reputation as one of Monroe County's most trusted plumbing teams under founder Shawn D. Buck. The licensed and insured company handles everything from emergency repairs to complex commercial and new construction projects, and has recently expanded into HVAC. Gavin Buck serves as the company's Chief Technology Officer.

The Challenge

Before Ply, Seaway ran inventory and procurement almost entirely on Excel and pen and paper. "We were losing a lot of materials. Things weren't getting tracked properly," Gavin says. "Technicians were making too many supply runs in between calls, and it was just overall very barbaric, and we were losing money."

The moment that made the problem impossible to ignore came while closing out a high-end residential project. A faucet needed for the final fixture delivery appeared to be missing, and the supplier that made it had closed for six months, since the part was manufactured overseas. Sourcing a replacement fixture package would have taken a 20-week lead time, and the homeowner was set to move in within two weeks. "The entire time we thought that the faucet was actually missing, that it was stolen or something got misplaced or damaged on site," Gavin says. After about a week of searching for alternatives and temporary units, the team found the faucet exactly where it had been delivered: sitting in their own dropbox the whole time. It was installed that same day, but the search cost them roughly a week they didn't need to lose.

Bringing in new software still wasn't a simple decision, mainly because of the scale of the team involved. "Our biggest hesitation before signing with Ply was the technician onboarding process," Gavin says. "Getting 35 technicians to kind of all agree on something and utilize the software correctly is a bit extravagant." What tipped the decision was Ply's own onboarding team, who came out to Seaway's warehouse to help lay it out strategically so technicians could find materials easily from day one.

The Solution

A normal day now starts with the warehouse manager checking technicians' pick lists and material requests and setting materials aside by name before the crews arrive. Ply's direct integration with Ferguson, Seaway's primary supplier, means incoming purchase orders route straight to the warehouse, and technicians scan barcodes on invoices to auto-populate accurate, vendor-specific pricing and markup. Min-and-max thresholds flag to the warehouse manager when a technician's stock is running low so it can be reordered before it becomes a problem.

Two years ago, a technician would show up to the warehouse assuming the materials they needed were on hand. "Long story short, we don't," Gavin says. Seaway's material house sits about 35 minutes north of the warehouse, while most jobs run south, adding up to roughly an hour and a half of driving before a technician had the right materials in hand.

Accuracy around returns and credits was another quiet cost. "Even credit tracking is extremely helpful for us," Gavin says. "Sometimes we'll request a credit from the vendor and it'll just be sitting here for a month and we won't realize that we still have the material and we haven't got the credit for it yet. Our supplier is billing us for it." Ply now tracks exactly when materials go back and when credit should follow.

Gavin's favorite feature, shared by his team, is visibility into each technician's stock against set min and max levels. "We're able to know exactly when we're doing an install job if the technician only has two, and they need four," he says, with Ferguson delivering the difference to the warehouse the next day. A close second is Ply's barcode matching, which unified Seaway's in-house barcodes with Ferguson's so the same part is never referred to by three different names across the team, the supplier, and the warehouse. On the supplier side, real-time Ferguson pricing that updates within seconds has become one of Seaway's biggest drivers for using Ply, especially useful as material costs have been rising unpredictably outside the usual January cycle.

When we have real-time pricing that updates, it gives us confidence when we're presenting that price to the homeowner that this is an accurate and fair price for both of us.

Gavin Buck, Chief Technology Officer at Seaway Plumbing

Implementation itself went smoothly, with Ply's team staying hands-on throughout. "I was bothering them almost every day asking questions about barcodes, what things should be named, what they thought strategically should be placed," Gavin says. "I could hop on the phone with Ben or whoever I needed to, to help out effectively get things laid out correctly."

The Results

• "Ply essentially paid for itself within two business days of actually working," Gavin says. Fewer unnecessary supply runs were part of it, but so was a quiet billing gap: technicians had often been under-billing for materials because manually logging what they used and guessing at pricing was time-consuming. With barcode scans pulling in accurate Ferguson pricing automatically, that gap closed.
• About an hour and a half saved per technician, per day. "I think I could probably say it saved us about an hour and a half per technician per day, which we have 35 technicians, which obviously amounts to a pretty extreme amount," Gavin says, on top of the gas costs saved from far fewer trips to the supply house.
• Outstanding credits cut more than in half. "Our outstanding credits went from about $53,000 a month down to $23,000 a month," Gavin says. Knowing exactly when returned materials were picked up, rather than letting them sit at the warehouse, closed the gap between what suppliers billed and what credits were actually owed.

Our billable hour actually increased about $83 an hour, just because of our technicians not having to make as many supply runs to the store.

Gavin Buck, Chief Technology Officer at Seaway Plumbing

Looking ahead, Seaway is launching a dedicated HVAC division with five full-time technicians and aims to double its plumbing service team from roughly six to twelve. "Ply is going to be a vital part in that," Gavin says. "We're going to know exactly what technician has what equipment, what materials, what they need serviced."