Quality-Control Software Gives Capital Electric Advantage on Large Projects
Kansas City-based Capital Electric is an electrical contractor taking on increasingly complex, large-scale construction projects, including data centers with strict documentation and quality requirements. As project demands grew, the team needed a better way to manage installation data, produce required documentation, and support field execution. They turned to Volano Software to help build a custom quality-control and labelling system with commodity and project tracking capabilities, software that has saved them hundreds of hours per project and reduced risk in the field.
When Capital Electric began taking on larger projects, they quickly ran into a gap: there was no system in place to manage the volume of data and documentation required. With no software to help manage the requirements of larger projects, Capital Electric Senior Project Manager Jeff Faust knew their chances of success would shrink.
On smaller jobs, teams could get by with spreadsheets or basic tools. But larger projects, in particular data center work, required far more detailed documentation, labeling, and quality verification. Producing that manually wasn’t realistic.
"There’s a little more in-depth requirements with what you turn into the general contractor and owner," Faust explained. "To produce the documentation alone, you have to have some sort of system."
Without a centralized solution, Faust said labeling thousands of cables would require manual entry, and documentation for quality control would be time-consuming and error prone. In addition, field and office teams lacked a consistent way to organize and deliver project data. The company needed something that could scale with the size and complexity of their work.
Capital Electric partnered with Volano Software to build a custom system tailored to their workflows. The initial phase focused on getting the team operational, including handling packaging, labeling, and required documentation for active projects.
"We just needed to get up and running," Faust said. "That was the whole basis of the first phase, to get everything we needed to run the job."
The platform Volano built allows teams to:
The system also includes built-in validation, catching errors during data uploads rather than allowing them to surface later in the field: "It’ll catch if you have any kind of spelling error or mismatch," Faust said. "You fix it before it ever becomes a problem."
From there, Capital Electric expanded the system with additional improvements and flexibility. The team worked with Volano to refine the interface, handle larger datasets, and improve usability as projects scaled from dozens of records to thousands.
"You start with 20 or 30 lines of data, and then suddenly it’s 7,000 or 8,000," Faust said. "We needed to clean up how that was displayed and managed."
Beyond core functionality, the platform was built to adapt. Teams can customize outputs, adjust labeling formats per project, and add job-specific data fields without needing development work.
"Every job has different requirements," Faust said. "We can change how things print out or what data we include and move from job to job without rebuilding anything."
The most immediate impact has been time savings, particularly around labeling and documentation. In fact, on a recent project, Capital Electric produced tens of thousands of labels using the system.
"If you had to hand jam all that, it would be a nightmare," Faust said. "It saves several hundred hours on a project."
By automating labeling and packaging:
The system has also improved accuracy. Built-in validation ensures that errors are caught early, before they affect installation work.
"If you get it to upload successfully, it susses out a lot of problems," Faust said. "We didn’t have much come back wrong."
For the quality team, the system provides a clear record of completed work, according to Project Manager Nick Biesemeyer. “Everything they need to turn in is right there in one packet,” he said.
While the platform includes broader commodity tracking capabilities, Capital Electric currently relies on it most for quality control and labeling, which are two areas where manual processes previously created the most strain.
Looking ahead, the team plans to expand usage into additional areas as needed, including prefab tracking and deeper project analytics. For Capital Electric, the biggest advantage isn’t just what the system does today – it’s what it can support next.
"I don’t think there exists a software that does exactly what we need," Faust said. "Everybody operates a little differently. Anybody of any scale, if they don’t have a solution like this already, they’re late to the party."
With a custom platform, the team can continue adapting the system to match new project requirements without changing how they operate.
"If we need something, we can add it," Faust said. "That flexibility makes a big difference."