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Videos ArchiveSix years into working with trade businesses across HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and beyond, Eleazar Avraham has heard a lot of problems. Scheduling headaches. Technician turnover. Cash flow crunches. But one issue comes up more consistently than any other.
Inventory.
“It is a popular feature that everybody wants figured out,” Avraham says. “But with the industry being so new, it’s not like there are hundreds of tools out there to solve these needs.”
That gap is what Avraham has built his consulting practice around. As the founder of Titan Navigator, he specializes in helping trade companies modernize their workflows, bridging the distance between pen-and-paper processes and the digital tools that are reshaping the industry. And in his experience, inventory is almost always where the biggest wins are hiding.
The Industry Is Growing Faster Than Its Systems
The trades are booming. Avraham has watched the industry expand well beyond residential service work into commercial projects and new construction. Private equity has entered the picture, creating multi-branch operations that need consistent systems running across dozens of locations at once. The scale of the work is growing. The complexity is growing. But many of the internal processes, Avraham says, have not kept up.
“The clay is still wet,” he explains. “The workflows, the best practices, the software ecosystems, all of it is still being figured out in real time.”
For him, that’s actually an opportunity. An industry still being shaped is one where the right ideas and the right tools can have an outsized impact. The challenge is that too many shops are still running inventory on gut instinct, spreadsheets, or simply hoping for the best, and when a business is carrying hundreds or thousands of parts across a warehouse, multiple vans, and scattered job sites, that approach compounds into a serious problem, fast.
What "No System" Actually Costs
Business owners tend to frame inventory as an organization problem, Avraham says. Things are a little messy, a little hard to track down. What they often miss is that it is really a profitability problem.
Parts go missing. Technicians arrive at a job underprepared and lose billable time making supply runs. Items get reordered that are already sitting in the warehouse. Vendor prices shift with every market fluctuation, but the price book does not get updated, leaving job costing based on numbers that are weeks or months out of date.
None of it shows up cleanly on a single report. It hides in the margins. But Avraham says the impact becomes visible fast once proper tracking is in place. “You are going to start to see results of profits increasing immediately,” he says. “Because now you are not wasting items. You do not have guys wasting time going to order items that you already have in the warehouse.”
Why Tech Adoption Is Finally Winning
Avraham has watched the industry’s relationship with technology shift noticeably over his six years in the space. There used to be more resistance, he says, and to some extent he understood it. The early tools were clunky, hard to learn, and often created more administrative burden than they relieved.
That argument doesn’t seem to hold anymore.
“The advantages now are so extremely large that there is no way you can argue that pen and paper is better,” Avraham says. Real-time tracking has replaced annual reports. Live job costing has replaced rough estimates. And crucially, the tools themselves have gotten better, designed to work the way technicians actually work, on the go, on a phone, without requiring time at a desk.
“People understand it now,” he says. “And I think also, before it was a theory. Now we have seen the proof of the financial gains by making workflows more efficient.”
What Good Implementation Looks Like
In Avraham’s experience, the difference between a successful software rollout and a failed one almost always comes down to the same thing: the price book.
“Your inventory system can only be as good as the information that you have in your price book,” he says. Before touching anything else, a business needs its items, costs, vendors, and charges clearly defined. That is always where he starts with new clients, working through the price book first, then vendors, then inventory management practices.
From there, his advice is to stay flexible and resist the urge to go live all at once. Staggering the rollout, onboarding two trucks this week and two more the next, keeps things manageable and gives the team time to adapt. “Getting counts from technicians is not the smoothest process,” Avraham says plainly. Building in time for that reality is just good planning.
The shops that see results fastest, he adds, are the ones that arrive genuinely invested. Not just flipping a switch, but ready to dig into the data and get their numbers right. “When you start to see that energy engage in the project, that is when you know you have found something valuable.”
What Ply Gets Right
Avraham first encountered Ply about a year and a half ago at a conference. He had been looking for an inventory solution he could actually stand behind with his clients, and most of what existed either lacked the depth the trades required or was built in a way that field technicians would never genuinely adopt.
Two things stood out immediately. The first was the mobile application. “I have not seen another tool that has had a mobile app for inventory that is this smooth,” Avraham says. Technicians can check truck stock, create purchase orders, transfer items, scan barcodes directly to an invoice, and complete inventory counts, all from their phone. For an industry where the real work happens in the field, that changes everything.
The second was automatic cost updates through purchase orders. When a vendor delivers and a PO is received in Ply, the incoming cost automatically updates the catalog, which flows through to the price book and into real-time job costing. In an environment where prices shift constantly, that kind of accuracy is more than a need. “Job costing is very popular,” Avraham says. “You want to know profit. You want to have a real insight into what those profit numbers are, accurately.”
Beyond the features, Avraham says what has kept him recommending Ply is how much the product has grown since he first found it. “I have seen Ply improve from when we met to where it is now,” he says. “When you see a company that is invested in their own future and really improving their product, that is attractive.”
The Bigger Picture
Inventory is not a glamorous problem. Nobody gets into the trades because they are excited about parts tracking. But Avraham is clear about the stakes. Getting it right means boosting cash flow, enabling technician efficiency, improving job costing, and increasing customer reliability all at once. It is one of the highest-leverage changes a shop can make.
“The clay is still wet,” Avraham says. “But it is hardening fast.”
The shops building the right systems now, he believes, will have a structural advantage over the ones still running on instinct and spreadsheets in five years’ time. His job, as he sees it, is to make sure his clients are not the ones left behind.
Eleazar Avraham is a software consultant at Titan Navigator, specializing in helping trade businesses modernize their operations through platforms like ServiceTitan and Ply.
