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Contra Costa Electric
Stolen Tools Recovered with ToolWatchs Help—California Electrical Contractor Gets Added Bonus from Tool Management Program
Situation
When Contra Costa Electric, an EMCOR-owned company and one of Californias five largest electrical contractors, implemented the ToolWatch system in 1996, it was for the typical reason—they couldnt find their tools.
With branches in Bakersfield, Martinez and Fresno, the company handles computer network, electrical system and fiber installations throughout the state. Projects often last several years and cover industrial, commercial, technology and utility fields. The Bakersfield branch alone runs 10-15 projects at a time, utilizing a collection of more than 3,000 tools with a value of more than $750,000. The company had long employed a hand-written system to track tools, and they regularly found it wasnt working.
When a six-month job was finished, you would go to the jobsite and tools would be scattered everywhere. You couldnt find anything. We were replacing the same tools over and over, explains Steve Herstad, purchasing and warehouse manager.
Contra Costa needed a better system and turned to ToolWatch to solve their tool management inadequacies. Not only did ToolWatch get Contra Costas tool warehouse under control, it provided an added benefit the company never expected.
Solution
Since implementing the ToolWatch tool and equipment management system, the speed with which Contra Costa can locate tools and get them where they need to be has improved dramatically. Even expensive specialized tools that the company only has a few of are easily pinpointed and moved from one jobsite to the next with great efficiency. This increased organization is an advantage for warehouse and field employees alike, who are better able to do their jobs when the tool they need is where it should be. Contra Costa expected this efficiency. They did not expect the call they received from a detective last December.
In January 2004, a Contra Costa jobsite had fallen prey to an experienced group of thieves. After presumably surveying the jobsite for some time, the thieves struck over a weekend, veiled by a dense morning fog that concealed their activities. Breaking into several C-train storage containers, the thieves made off with threading equipment, generators and a variety of cordless tools, totaling a loss of nearly $30,000 for the company.
Months passed and nothing was recovered. The National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates that the construction industry loses $1 billion annually from equipment and tool theft. Nobody expected the tools that had disappeared from the jobsite would be an exception. But when members of the Cargo Theft Interdiction Program, a coordinated, multi-jurisdiction law enforcement agency effort responsible for the prevention and investigation of cargo theft in Southern California, discovered a warehouse in Long Beach full of stolen tools, Contra Costa got a pleasant surprise.
Result
Working their way through the recovered tools, officers noticed several with easily recognizable ToolWatch barcodes. They placed a call to ToolWatch and discovered that the company kept a database of which barcodes were assigned to each client. ToolWatch told the officers to call Contra Costa.
The investigating officer called Herstad to tell him that several company tools had been recovered. A year after the incident, Herstad was surprised, but wasted no time looking up the barcodes in his database to provide positive identification. Like many other contractors, Contra Costa also engraves a company marking into each tool. But since it is often abbreviated or unrecognizable to those outside the organization, it was the presence of the ToolWatch barcode that ensured their tools safe return.
So far, Contra Costa has recovered about four of the tools stolen that foggy morning last January. Its not much, but compared with a warehouse full of tools whose owners are likely to never see again, its at least a start. If the police find our stolen tools, ToolWatch gives us confidence that we will get them back, Steve explained. Thats more than most contractors can say.
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