By David Keane, Sales Director, Trimble Operations and Workflow Solutions
While thousands of small and medium-sized businesses embody the “American dream,” the phrase fits F+F Mechanical neater than the complex HVAC and plumbing systems they expertly craft and install. What started in a Connecticut garage with a single second-hand utility truck has, more than 40 years later, grown into a team of nearly 300 professionals who design, fabricate, install and service intricate mechanical systems for critical, high-tech institutions from hospitals to high schools.
For most of those four decades, F+F Mechanical ran on the same systems as many of its industry peers: spreadsheets, paper timecards, forms and payroll reports, and binders full of contracts and work orders. But growth has put pressure on paper, and as their physical footprint expanded, so too did their digital one. Bucking long-standing manual processes, they’ve adopted a technology-first approach that’s not only streamlining workflows but strengthening job satisfaction and quality of life for employees in the office and the field.
‘We want to be the engine, not the caboose’
For F+F Mechanical, technology adoption is neither a linear journey, nor a static one. Rather, it’s a steady, systematic evolution, a series of smart, incremental changes driven by a simple belief: adapt to stay ahead, or become a dinosaur.
“We are a different company today than we were just a year ago,” says Joe Ferrucci, who leads the company with his brothers Frank and John, all sons of the founder, Mario Ferrucci. “And in a year from now, I hope and think we will be a different company than we are today. It's a never-ending process, and it's a constant evolution.”
“F+F is definitely a construction company under construction; we never stay the status quo,” echoes Alyssa D’Amico, F+F Mechanical’s applications manager. “If something works, we will keep it, but technology changes on a dime. We are always looking for the next advancement that is going to give us a leg up in the industry and more efficiency.”
But there’s a clear-eyed understanding that efficiency and advanced capabilities are only part of the technology equation. With teams dispersed across corporate headquarters, a pair of fabrication shops and job sites throughout Connecticut, any solution short of simple, reliable and connected can be more headache than helpful. And for staff with varying levels of comfort and capability—especially veteran frontline workers—one chance might be all new technology gets.
Facilitating the flow
As the complexity of mechanical systems continues to grow, the physical space and timelines to install them are only becoming more compressed. This puts considerable strain on companies like F+F Mechanical to reduce drag within their workstreams, from procurement, virtual design and construction (VDC) and fabrication, to delivery, installation and maintenance.
“We want to eliminate the roadblocks,” Ferrucci says. “When we eliminate roadblocks, things can continue to flow and move along the line much faster. That's critical to our success.”
For years, the company has relied on Trimble Total Stations as a critical piece of hardware to accurately lay out hangers and other equipment in the field. But it was Viewpoint Spectrum, Trimble’s modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, that became not just a foundational tool in the F+F tech stack, but a springboard for a more cohesive, connected ecosystem that bridges office and field.
“Trimble is all integrated,” Ferrucci notes, adding that F+F has since adopted nearly a dozen Trimble solutions across its workflows, from AutoBid for estimates and ProjectSight for project management to Traqspera for time entry and Trimble Connect as the hub to sync them all. “The joy of that and the beauty of that is that we have all live data across multiple platforms, across multiple solutions. When they're all working together, and when they're all synchronized, it's a wonderful thing because today we're asked to build more sophisticated buildings faster than we ever have.”
From skeptics to supporters
Ferrucci points to employees like Jim Sullivan, a lead sheet metal estimator and manager who was an original hire by his father more than 35 years ago. For decades, Jim’s desk was more paper than metal and wood. Now, it holds just two monitors where he effortlessly navigates between Trimble solutions.
Across teams, manual, tedious work, once prone to errors, duplication and unnecessary physical handoffs, is now connected and collaborative. From office to shops to field and back, transparent workflows and ‘golden records,’ single, indisputable sources of truth of models, drawings, RFIs, submittals, work orders and other critical documentation, form the connective tissue within project lifecycles. This enables:
An office-based VDC manager to walk through the latest drawings with a field team hours away on site, answering questions about recent updates before installation begins.
A service technician to instantly access ticket history, parts orders, previous notes, and model/serial data, preparing more effectively for calls and closing tickets from the cab of their truck.
A field team to monitor real-time status of piping or duct designs released to the shops, track what’s been fabricated, and trigger shipments to site, reducing backlog on shop floors while maintaining unforgiving timelines.
These magical moments are proving to be gamechangers. Not only are they simplifying workflows and democratizing data, they’re empowering ownership and converting skeptics into evangelists—especially in the field, where technology is no longer viewed as a liability, but a lifeline.
“Traqspera, for example, was an ‘aha’ moment for them; they love that product,” D’Amico says. “Also, seeing them in the data vaults where they would not have been around a computer at all, and now they're flying through the models and they're looking at their projects and they're looking at their data with their submittals and interacting with it on a daily basis. They wouldn't do that even two years ago.”
Technology drives quality of life
Technology’s impact on quality of work is obvious. But its influence on quality of life is sometimes overlooked. At a company that has long strived to operate under construction hours—the office is bustling at 5:30 a.m.—technology is helping staff reclaim more time for what’s important: life.
“I think we all recognize that technology has greatly impacted our lives,” Ferrucci says. “We can get data faster and we have more information at our fingertips. I think the technology that we use certainly contributes to our effectiveness on a daily basis. There are less steps, less clicks, less windows and screens that someone has to navigate through to complete their work.”
For Sandy Lentini, F+F Mechanical’s controller, this was most evident in certified payroll reports—once a protracted, duplicate-prone process where complex union and non-union data was tracked across various spreadsheets. Now, integrated tools like Spectrum and Traqspera not only increase confidence in the output but reduce report generation from a week-plus to less than a day.
This shift has helped evolve her role from a number processor to a strategic information leader and freed more hours in her week to run errands, workout or hit the tennis courts.
“This is probably one of the first accounting positions I've had, or controller positions I've had, that I don't work until nine o'clock at night; I don't work on weekends,” Lentini says. “There are times when it's month-end or quarter-end where I have to work a little extra time, but the work-life balance is just so much nicer to be able to generate reports without having to do all of the ticking and tying and the reconciliations outside of the system.”
It’s a sentiment shared throughout the company, where technology is giving employees more time to coach, golf, fish and enjoy the things they love. For D'Amico, this means spending more of her afternoons in the field—football field, that is—making sure she’s on the sidelines for her kids’ games and practices.
“Leaving on time is very important, especially when you have children and games to get to and dinners to make,” she says. “The fact that we as a culture here put that front and center is really important from an organizational standpoint. We do not want people to be inundated with paperwork and all of these things, so they can't get out and actually live their lives as well. Any technology that we can implement that can help them have a really good work-life balance is what we always try to strive for.”
Tech inspired, people powered
Technology is undoubtedly elevating how F+F Mechanical operates. Yet Ferrucci is mindful that the pace and progress of digital transformation largely depend on the people behind it. As change accelerates, the values his father built the company on—integrity, honesty and professionalism—remain just as relevant today as they were 40-plus years ago.
“My brothers and I truly believe that when we go home at night, we want to go to sleep and not worry about how we treated someone, what we said to someone. We want them to come back happy the next day because a happy workforce means happy clients; happy clients mean repeat clients; that's the trick to our success.”
Learn more about the connected solutions from Trimble that are helping companies like F+F Mechanical transform their business.
