IRONPROS met with Kojo Director of Partnerships Michael Lau at CONEXPO to discuss the use cases for the company's construction procurement and logistics software and the growing assortment of trades for which it is a fit.
IRONPROS: We wanted to get some time with you guys, because you're addressing a part of construction that a lot of you might not think about, the procurement of materials, and making sure that you're maximizing your spend and being efficient. So when someone works with you, and signs up for your software, what are some of the functional benefits that they're going to get?
LAU: So we've heard a lot of pain from a lot of our customers, that whole process managing material procurement is painful. There's lots of phone calls, emails, and Excel spreadsheets, none of them are speaking together. And in general, it's a really disparate process. And what we do is we bring it all onto one platform. No longer do you overspend on materials, because you didn't realize that you had something in the warehouse, and no longer are you paying hours upon hours upon hours of labor, because people are manually going line-by-line and matching items on the invoice with the correct prices on purchase orders and delivery receipts. So we bring it all to one place. We have an application in the field that makes it so it's much easier for the people on the ground to place requests, whether it's to the office or directly to a vendor, depending on how you all work. And then on top of that, we actually make the paperwork trail really simple so it automatically goes directly to your ERP system. So you no longer are manually doing that, and potentially having errors along the way.
IRONPROS: So what are some of the problems that people might experience without the solution? What are the pain points that they're going feel that make them just make them think, hey, we need to talk to Kojo?
LAU: So point number one is people just spend too much on materials. They don't realize that when they ordered a bunch of equipment, and supplies or a product, that they have it. And when they're going to multiple job sites, they realize, 'oh, where's that one widget? I don't know where it is.' So they need to go order it again, because they can't find it. And all of a sudden, you spent too much on that.
