McGuire and Hester Brings Safety to the Forefront with 811spotter Ticket Automation

Managing 811 ticket renewals was a resource-intensive endeavor at McGuire and Hester, a heavy civil, site work and landscape contractor based in California. Integrating 811spotter’s purpose-built automated system into daily operations empowered the company to focus more time and resources on its core business.

Challenge

As a safety administrator, Rene Acosta oversees the worker safety at McGuire and Hester; his primary responsibilities include managing compliance, conducting site audits and training crews on safety protocols.

“The main goal is the safety and protection of our staff,” says Acosta. “My job is to make sure every employee has the necessary tools and certifications to operate safely and complete projects on time and within budget.”

A critical part of Acosta’s role is managing the 811 ticketing process, a responsibility he’s shouldered for
several years at McGuire and Hester. Today, it’s an efficient process automated by 811spotter. But this wasn’t
always the case, as Acosta remembers all too well.

Before implementing 811spotter, he and his team manually tracked tickets through spreadsheets, spending
hours per day on data entry and renewals.

“If we missed a renewal, it could cost thousands of dollars in delays,” recalls Acosta. “The manual process was a tremendous weight on my shoulders.”

"Knowing that our tickets are automated through 811spotter gives us immense peace of mind, enabling us to shift our time and focus to the productivity and safety of our work crews.”

Rene Acosta, Safety Administrator, McGuire and Hester

It was not a burden that could be easily shared. The manual 811 ticket process and all the details therein made knowledge transfer and training a challenge, which meant very few employees could cover for Acosta if he was sick or taking time off.

A short vacation had to be planned weeks in advance, requiring Acosta to create a policy and map out details by keystroke, line by line, in order to temporarily hand over the system. This presented even more safety issues.

Solution

Acosta embraces technology and sees a growing role for it in the construction industry. “Better technology means less labor cost, less downtime, and more importantly, less injuries,” says Acosta. Acosta wondered if there was something innovative out there for his 811-ticketing headache. He found out about 81lspotter as a system that could streamline the 811-ticketing process specific to contractors. Acosta wanted to take it for a test drive.

“When I learned how easy it was, and once we enrolled and got all the tickets over to 811spotter, the migration was seamless,” recalls Acosta. “Once we were on 811spotter, we never looked back.”

Rene Acosta, Safety Administrator, McGuire and Hester

Outcome

The process of migrating McGuire and Hester 811 tickets took about a week. Now, all tickets flow automatically into 811spotter, regardless of who creates them, and are quickly organized by job. Acosta can export tickets into Excel for easy communication to the field or any other stakeholders.

Today, McGuire and Hester's 811 ticket process is a well-oiled machine that:

• Averages 200 monthly tickets managed by 811spotter.
• Frees up time to focus on ensuring 100% compliance with safety and damage prevention.
• Enables the 811 process custodian to take vacation time without planning a temporary handover to another employee.

With 811spotter’s automated ticket management platform, McGuire and Hester enjoy exponential benefits. Untold hours of manual data entry, inevitable human errors with costly consequences, missed communications that risk safety, these are no longer burdens to the organization.

811spotter does all the heavy lifting, automatically renewing tickets and updating stakeholders through notifications. For the McGuire and Hester team, this means more time to focus on the business of building and maintaining worker safety.

“Knowing that renewals are automatically taken care of through 811spotter gives us peace of mind and shifts the focus entirely to interacting with our work crews and ensuring their safety.”

Rene Acosta, Safety Administrator, McGuire and Hester

McGuire and Hester is a 100% employee-owned heavy civil and site work contractor based in Alameda, California, founded in 1926. Serving both public and private clients across Northern California, the company self-performs services including grading, paving, pipelines, concrete, landscape, mechanical, and construction management. With a mission of “Together We Build Things Right,” McGuire and Hester emphasizes lean construction, collaboration, and community involvement—continuing a legacy of integrity, innovation, and philanthropy through its employee ownership model and charitable foundation.