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About Alberni Electric
Alberni Electric is a respected electrical contractor based in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. Since 2012, they have provided exceptional residential and commercial electrical services to Port Alberni, Tofino, Ucluelet, and surrounding areas.
With a team of four licensed Red Seal journeymen and three apprentices, Alberni Electric is committed to safety, quality, and superior customer service. In recent years, they launched a new division, VI Power Guard, to expand into clean energy solutions, including solar power installations, generators, car chargers, and maintenance services, responding to a competitive market and a growing demand for sustainable energy.
The Challenge
Operating in a location with no nearby wholesaler, Alberni Electric carries between 1,200 and 1,400 inventory items at any given time. After a period of rapid growth, the company found itself without the systems needed to manage that volume and the cracks began to show.
Stock would disappear into vans or onto job sites without being logged, leading to overstocking, dead inventory, and constant reordering of items they already had. But the most painful problem showed up at billing time. Each technician had their own informal language for parts and their handwritten material lists reflected that.
That four-person billing loop, from tech to manager to admin and back again, was draining time, creating frustration, and slowing down cash flow.
The Solution
Alberni Electric needed a system that would standardize how materials were logged, integrate with their existing tools, and fit into the daily routines of a field-based team. And Ply ticked all the boxes.
With Ply, technicians now log materials directly into jobs from their phones, using standardized product descriptions pulled from the system. The guesswork is gone and so is the paper trail. Inventory updates flow between Ply and Jobber in real time, giving the office clear visibility into stock levels across the warehouse, vans, and job sites.
The Ply team’s support also stood out during rollout, making the transition smoother even for the more old-school members of the team:
The Results
Since implementing Ply, Alberni Electric has seen meaningful improvements across billing, inventory management, and day-to-day operations.
- Billing that actually closes: Removing the multi-person material review loop has dramatically shortened billing cycles, with jobs processed far faster than before.
- Real inventory visibility: The team can now see at a glance what’s in the warehouse, what’s in vans, and what’s running low, eliminating the guesswork that led to costly overordering and dead stock.
- Standardized material language: Techs log materials using consistent, specific descriptions, which has eliminated admin back-and-forth and reduced billing errors.
- Jobber integration that just works: As Stacey puts it, the Ply-Jobber integration is the standout feature. Inventory numbers update automatically across both systems, keeping the office and the field in sync.
- A foundation for growth: With VI Power Guard expanding into clean energy services, Ply gives Alberni Electric the operational backbone to scale without the chaos that came with rapid growth before.
Stacey’s recommendation to other contractors is unequivocal:
