No Looking Back: The HL Bowman Story

About HL Bowman

HL Bowman has been a family-owned plumbing, heating, and air conditioning company since 1946. Today it's led by father-and-son owners Dennis and Bryan Enders, the second and third generations at the helm, out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The company has expanded well beyond its Central Pennsylvania roots, now operating across Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts with a growing number of warehouses supporting that footprint.

The Challenge

HL Bowman's growth has been steep. "Four or five years ago we were south of $50 million. Two years ago we closed at 68. Last year we closed at 95," Alan says. That kind of expansion outpaced the systems supporting it. "You can't know your guys quite as well at that point, adding teams quickly," Alan says, and every new market brought its own rules, regulations, and ordering complications.

The clearest sign something had to change showed up at the end of each season. "We have a whole bunch of returns on the shelf because we were looking one direction," Alan says, a problem that only grew worse as install volume increased. HL Bowman built a partial fix, custom install boxes for technicians, which cut down returns but created a new blind spot: "then where's our job costing?"

The financial impact was steep and measurable. In the Harrisburg market alone, margins fell from around 33% to 24%, then to 21%. "When you're talking about a business that's at $100 million, that's a massive impact to our bottom line," Alan says, putting the losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bringing in new software wasn't a decision to take lightly at that scale. "You never really have a true picture of how it's going to be to work with another company," Alan says, and rolling out any system across a spread-out, fast-growing business meant getting stakeholder buy-in and allowing real time for it to land. Technicians, many of them not eager adopters of new technology, were skeptical from the start. "Their reaction a lot of times is going to be, well, this is just something to make your job in the warehouse or in the office easier," Alan says. "It's definitely not the case."

The Solution

Once HL Bowman committed, the rollout moved at a pace Alan hadn't seen before. "We stood this up for $50 million worth of our business in a two-to-three month period," he says, with the Ply team on-site throughout, running field trainings and adjusting the process as real usage surfaced new needs. That groundwork made every following market rollout faster.

Consolidating purchasing power was central to the fix. HL Bowman narrowed from over a dozen suppliers down to one or two with vendor-managed inventory in place, so materials are stocked and ready rather than picked up ad hoc. "We have virtually no shop time at suppliers that aren't on our property," Alan says.

What won Alan over wasn't a single feature but the full system working together. "My favorite piece of Ply is really the whole package," he says. "All of our warehousing needs are met through Ply, and then the financial aspects that plug into the back end of that... it's basically an ecosystem for us." That includes dashboards tailored differently for finance leadership versus warehouse managers, all rolling up into the same underlying data.

Ply's AI features have become part of daily work too. Picture-to-PO lets a technician photograph a one-off part quote at a supply house and turn it directly into a purchase order, skipping manual entry into the price book. "It saves time," Alan says. AI-powered search has also made it faster to find parts across the dozens of supplier catalogs HL Bowman used to check individually, and AI plays a role in three-way match, flagging when a supplier's billed pricing doesn't match what was agreed. "This supplier has been incorrect in their pricing that they bill to us 8% of the time," Alan says. "Without Ply's AI, we might catch a part or two... but that means we're missing the other 7%. Nobody can look at everything."

The Results

• Every job out of the Harrisburg and Allentown warehouses is now 100% job costed. That level of accuracy, Alan says, "would not be possible without" Ply.
• Ply paid for itself within the first two months, even accounting for the extra hours the team put into getting inventoried and set up.
• Substantial labor savings from eliminating shop time. With installers averaging $45 an hour and roughly an hour to an hour and a half saved per trip, across two-person install teams and 16 install crews in just one market, Alan estimates tens of thousands of dollars recovered per month, savings that compound as Ply rolls out to additional markets.
• Better cross-team visibility and coaching opportunities. Warehouse and purchasing staff are now more closely connected to field crews, reacting faster to what techs actually need, and spotting when one technician is using significantly more material than peers on comparable jobs. "It often identifies a training opportunity for us with individuals," Alan says.
• Real historical data where there was none before. Buying from 15 different suppliers previously meant no unified view of usage. "I didn't have any data before," Alan says. Now purchasing decisions and supplier negotiations are backed by actual numbers.

Looking ahead, HL Bowman plans to make Ply standard for every new market and acquisition from day one, and is working toward smart-warehouse automation, using scales to verify that install boxes are restocked with exactly what's needed based on real usage data. Alan's take on any hesitation the business had along the way: "There's no looking back."