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Preferred Materials

Preferred Materials Reached 81% of Employees with a Communication Mobile App.

Client Profile

300%

Increase in communication
engagement

1st Place

Innovation Award out of 47,000
employees

48 Sites

Connected Through one
Mobile App

Preferred Materials Needed to Improve Employee Communication and Reduce HR Workload

Preferred Materials is a regional supplier of building materials and paving services and has 1,875 employees.

Client Requirements And Challenges

Preferred Materials Needed to Improve Employee Communication and Reduce HR Workload

Field employees without company email addresses experienced difficulty in obtaining personnel and benefits information from HR due to limited calling hours. Only 20 percent of their employees were office-based and had a company email address or access to this information. The HR department was also challenged by time spent fielding employee calls. Preferred Materials wanted a cost-effective way to consolidate important information into one single interface through a mobile app.

The BuildFire Solution

Custom Mobile App for Communicating with Employees

  1. Preferred Materials’ mobile app fulfilled multiple customized functions — serving as a benefits and personnel information hub, with an easy to use dashboard for administrators to control communication and send targeted messages directly to users phones.
  2. BuildFire conducted a one-hour tutorial that enabled Preferred Materials managers to understand the dashboard.
  3. Early success story: Communicating with a push notification to employees regarding plant closures due to Hurricane Irma.

“Before BuildFire, our information for employees was fragmented in all sorts of places. Since implementing our BuildFire app, we’ve been able to consolidate information in one centralized location.”

Debbie Vega-Hofmann | Director of Marketing & Communications

The Results

BuildFire Helped Preferred Materials Reach 81% of Employees Compared to 20% Before Implementing their Mobile Communication App.

The BuildFire solution provides a 24/7 information hub for employees at the touch of their phone. Push notifications from the Preferred Materials mobile app help the company to expedite sending information to their employees. As noted by Deborah Vega-Hofmann, the Senior Director of Marketing and Communication for the company, “HR has been able to get their time back. And we get fantastic information from the analytics.”