Lee Company

The Customer 

Literally starting with „one man and a truck“ in 1944, Lee Company has grown by a factor of 20x since 1998 to be regarded as one of the most reputable residential and commercial HVAC, plumbing and electrical providers in the Southeastern US. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, it is a family-owned HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractor, powered by a team of caring professionals and built on decades of experience. 

Offering „all you need“ from HVAC, plumbing, electrical and appliance repair through to large construction design and build projects, Lee Company works with both residential customers and commercial clients in government, institutional, commercial, healthcare and industrial organisations. The company prides itself on competing based on quality, convenience and availability, not necessarily price. Lee’s corporate strategy is focused on growing its geographic footprint throughout the Southeast, from $370 million today to over $700 million by 2030. It became clear to leadership that, to keep maturing and fulfilling its ambitious goals, the company urgently needed to modernise its systems for managing people, information, projects and relationships, according to Chief Financial Officer Rob Ivy. It knew it had to update its 20-year-old, on-premise ERP and digitally transform the entire organisation across all business units, a huge undertaking for a diverse sales, service and construction provider, to set a new standard for customer and employee experience while building a solid, flexible foundation for future growth. 

The Challenge 

Lee Company was at an inflection point with its legacy ERP systems, which were failing to keep up with the velocity of change in the digital economy. The limitations, siloed data and the inability to scale, could not be masked with patches and workarounds.

We had four diverse business units and a lot of those processes, particularly within the different service business units, were disparate. It didn’t allow us to achieve any economy of scale, and it didn’t allow us to share resources.

The decision to move to a cloud ERP was a prime opportunity to assess the broader possibilities and transformative impact of change, which required reimagining how the business created value for customers and replacing legacy thinking along with the legacy system. Lee then faced a critical decision: choose a distributed solution with separate construction, service and facility management platforms, or an integrated, single-platform solution. The company evaluated both and decided that an integrated solution, specifically the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, was the right choice, given its integrated ERP data and Azure-based modern data estate capabilities. 

We plan to double the number of markets we serve by 2030, and we need to add 3 or 4 new service lines to our business. With that diversification, we needed a platform that would allow us to integrate easily, or to find other software solutions that would integrate easily. We felt that the D365 platform was exactly that solution.

The Solution 

Finance and Operations. Tight integration and bi-directional, dual-write updates between Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Dynamics 365 Sales allow the sales and operations teams to share real-time information with project accounting and other back-office users. Supporting functions such as estimating and bidding, and project and inventory management, allow for transparent financial analysis and for control of projects to be tightly integrated with field operations. Reporting is now provided through Power BI’s interactive business analytics tools, so all the company’s sales, operations and finance and accounting data is available for users, from the operations team to executives, to slice and dice information and uncover valuable insights. 

Field Service. Even though Lee Company always provided excellent service, legacy software made it difficult for employees to do their jobs effectively. Dynamics 365 Field Service’s advanced, integrated capabilities allow Lee’s field service technicians, engineers and managers to connect Dynamics 365 Sales and back-office data with overall field service operations, providing advanced scheduling and workforce management. Enhanced dispatch capabilities, including machine-learning-based smart routing and skills-based technician assignment, ensure that the right technicians with the right skills are dispatched, allowing for greater efficiency and productivity in the field and a better service experience for customers. 

Construction Project Management. Many of Lee’s commercial construction business processes had never been digitalised, requiring a ground-up approach to building process flows, data integrations and tooling. Hitachi Solutions‘ Engage for Construction product provided the foundation, because it centralises, automates and simplifies the project lifecycle and provides key integrations to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Project Accounting. Developers then added functionality and customisations to provide a full-service mobile solution based on Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Apps for project superintendents, managers and field technicians for timekeeping, safety verification and project management, putting productivity tooling at employees‘ fingertips wherever and whenever they are working. 

Why Hitachi Solutions 

Lee Company interviewed many potential partners, and its executives agreed that Hitachi Solutions was the best partner to lead the transformation. They immediately noted the „like“ cultures between the organizations as a fit that would promote collaboration, efficiency and ultimately success, and were reassured that Hitachi Solutions had been named Microsoft Field Services Partner of the Year several times in recent years. As Ivy noted, field service is the more complex part of the business, so that designation was critical, but Lee also felt Hitachi Solutions had the depth of resources that other partners it evaluated did not. Hitachi Solutions‘ ability to complete an end-to-end Dynamics 365 implementation, along with its Engage for Construction solution, was key, as was its willingness to customize and create new functionality in its own product to drive efficiency and profitability across the construction business unit. 

A partner like Hitachi Solutions, who also had a mind towards innovation and toward developing their own intellectual property around the Microsoft platform, was also a good partnership for us. And it has turned out to be so.

That partnership has continued through Hitachi Solutions‘ Managed Services group, which augments Lee’s staff to this day. The value ranges from solving complex issues that require innovative thinking to providing day-to-day operational support, building new enhancements, escalating issues that need specialist support, and even drawing on Microsoft’s expertise when needed. With Hitachi Solutions‘ guidance, Lee Company’s internal resources have grown and matured to the point that the company has reduced its annual managed services expenditure by two-thirds. As Hitachi Solutions‘ Vice President of Sales, Mike Oster, put it: „Our goal, and Lee’s, was to build their internal team so that they could become more and more self-sufficient on their own.“ 

The Benefits 

• A sleek, new data platform that unifies data across all four business units, with the connectivity, data visibility and business intelligence to operate more efficiently, and the ability to scale for sustainable growth 
• Daily data exports from a modern Azure data warehouse, with citizen developers using the Power Platform, making output more real-time, robust and reliable than the old approach of exporting and manipulating data in Excel 
• Complete visibility of the construction project lifecycle, with granular labour-spend insight used to fine-tune schedules and increase margins, and a real-time view of daily per-project costs 
• A construction revenue projection model that merges finance and operations backlog data with the sales opportunity pipeline to forecast revenue well into 2026 
• A streamlined, single-entity customer experience, ending the days of four different people or four separate account statements, with Power BI analytics to designate strategic accounts 
• New Power Apps self-service portals for scheduling and service updates, reducing time and effort for both customers and service representatives 

We’ve grown a lot internally with respect to cloud software, what it takes to really make it work, and what it takes to maintain it. Fortunately, we picked Hitachi Solutions. They’ve been fantastic. Not only have they bent over backward to make sure we have the solution we need, but they’re right there with us.

What’s Next? 

Lee Company is on a path toward reorienting its managers from decision-making based on intuition to decision-making based on data, and sees AI and IoT as core technologies it will leverage extensively to optimize operations, reduce costs and make more informed decisions.

We’re changing the culture of the company from ‚managing by feel‘ to managing based on data analytics. We plan to be a 100-year-old company, and so we wanted to buy a platform that would be innovating with us for the next 20 years. That’s one of the reasons we went with Microsoft and Hitachi Solutions. We won’t ever outgrow them, and our people are excited about that.