Electrical Project Manager Industrial Automation
(Charlottesville/Harrisonburg, Virginia)

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We are the strongest engineering driven private electrical designer/builder on the East Coast and will provide an overview. This is not a family business, which is important for those considering real career growth.

Here is a perspective rarely used but it reasonably describes us. The reality of our capabilities, capacities and breadth of service offerings can survive the .45 test and here is how that goes: You’re bragging about the quality of your job and the company you work for at the neighborhood watering hole. You have said “better and best” about your job and the company twenty-five times over the past fifteen minutes and the large and generally frightening looking soul sitting next to you at the bar pulls out his custom 1911 .45 auto, places it in your ear, pulls the hammer back and tells you that if you cannot substantiate the numerous claims you have made about your job and miraculous employer you are going to be a historical memoir. If you are working for us, you will walk away unscathed from that situation.

What we bring to the table for the client is career insurance for you. The resources at your command here will exceed those you will find elsewhere. The business systems you will learn and master here are as sophisticated as are applied in construction anywhere, and that will not only make work more interesting and successful, but it insures the growth of your personal professional took kit. When you review available integrated technologies, bonding limits, cash on hand, qualifications, internal engineering capacity, tooling, project histories, field force, prefabrication capabilities, relationships, special certifications, clearances, and integration of services (heavy power to specialized IT), there is no genuine competitor on the East Coast. We are geared for recession proof work with a backlog exceeding half a billion dollars on hand as contracts now.

Our leadership and field management have long careers with us, all the vendors fight for our business because they are paid on time, the clients we have served continue to use us and even our competition is respectful. Real success must encompass all of those successes. Our differentiation makes your career more secure and insures that you will always continue to learn while working for us. The short story is that we can engineer and stamp in every discipline we build from true high voltage, to low voltage VDV networks. We go as far as having complimentary professional engineering teams that have both electrical P.E. and mechanical P.E. staff members for critical facilities work, because you cannot design and build a power system for a Tier IV facility without controlling both the electrical and mechanical design and implementation. We employ P.E. Civil Engineers as well, which allows us to work as a Prime Contractor on specialized jobs where we build entire facilities.

What we are looking for from you is your personal character (passion, commitment, drive, energy, intelligence and common sense) in combination with your project management experience and automation system integration knowledge and experience. If you are the person we are looking for you have been and would be a success story at any integration firm you went to work for. As a self-motivated, smart and driven person you bring your personal success to any organization you choose to work for and we know that and respect that.

What we are offering you is a faster, broader, deeper and more satisfying track to the success you will achieve one way or another. What we can and will provide for you are systems, tools and backing of the kind you cannot get elsewhere. Perhaps you have come this far without the ultimate tool kit, but why not bring the very best organization into your war chest to help move your career, put you in front of the best work, and continue to build your experience based doing really challenging work?

Our work is often the work of a true designer builder. We have an in house engineering staff for HV and MV power, facilities power, systems integration, and even network and IT engineering as the front end for a killer field staff. We have proven ourselves in diverse and recession proof markets. The local engineering firms are not as well staffed as we are, and design/build with us offers economy, project success and schedule integrity that the traditional independent consulting engineer plus selected contractor process does not provide, even if they are operating as a JV partnership.

The local, state and Federal governments have contracted our services for more than fifty years and we have been entirely successful in that arena. Those old relationships are deep and proven. Decades of getting special Federal clearances for our staff have earned us the position of “invited vendor” for much of what we do. The point is here that 25% of what we do you cannot bid on at all. How many defense intelligence agency secret facilities do you think hit the Dodge Reports or any bid list?? They approach us.

Beyond the specialized automation work, big commercial, big institutional, big industrial, traffic and even transit are all sectors in our business along with the full low voltage and systems integration businesses. We even provide specialty Internet hosting services and broadcast specialties.

Our strategy includes growth and our targets are absolutely specific. We have grown every year and we have accomplished that by a combination of ordinary relationship expansions, entirely new models for engaging our services, the expansion of specialized capabilities and by business acquisitions. That growth is strong enough and steady enough to allow every committed manager in our organization to move up the ladder. Numerous project managers have become program managers and division managers here. Some have gone farther. If a continuous career climb is something you are looking for and willing to work hard to secure, you will make that happen here.

Our basic goodness is genuine one stop shopping for very complex needs from high voltage to complete conceptual design of automation systems. We have not had a layoff in our construction services divisions for more than FIFTY YEARS. We have grown for more than fifty years and move our people up whenever we can. We are nice people and a nice place to work. There is a very thin management layer so your relationship will be personal, we will know you, you will know everybody that counts and there is loyalty. This is a great job. If you are an electrical engineer with construction orientation, we have dozens of career paths you can look at. We are going to hire mindset. What that means is that we are looking for a person that wants to invest in a career path. The bottom line is that you can expand upon our career offering in automation infrastructure project management here. We have shining star examples that have become distinguished division management coming out of positions like this working for us.

ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR JOB AND JOB QUALIFICATIONS

This business division does industrial automation design and build. It is the creative application of PLC, HMI and SCADA for the control and monitoring of a very wide variety of industrial and institutional processes. Often beginning with conceptual design, we take process concepts and render design, detail, and then proceed with the systems construction, commissioning, turn over to the client with O&M documentation and as often as not, we are involved in training those clients. The job is project management, but within the context of this kind of specialized work, the project manager is really a bit of an engineer, the project manager, the field superintendent and the QA/QC manager.

Based on project size you may be required to prepare an AIA schedule of values. A great project manager knows how to front load that schedule and how to see his or her way into positive cash flow as soon as possible.You will perform an operational review of estimates. If you can estimate, all the better.You will participate in the submittal assembly, presentation and review processes.You may be involved in proposal development and presentation.Using some computer based tools (Project, Primavera, Excel) you will prepare a critical path schedule with man-loading and cash loading.You will review manufacturer’s provided systems documentation and design and lead a team to install the infrastructure for the automation systems. Job start up and coordination with field management.Provide field project oversight, training, mentoring, inspection an all possible support and guidance through the construction. You will be on site side-by-side with your installer team.You will support client interface and meeting responsibilities with owners, general contractors, agency personnel, and vendors along with the coordinated trades for these projects.You will employ a project tracking system and report in terms of percentage completion, cost to complete, WIP cost accruals and forecasting. You will be responsible for Change Order management on the jobs you run, which may include estimating, presentation, negotiation and client acceptance processes.You will be responsible for complete financial tracking of jobs, change or scope and change orders. Cost accruals, cost to complete and forecasting is all part of this.Vendor relationship development is something you will do.RFI formulation and writing.Relationship development with consulting engineers, owners’ representatives and coordinated trades is a portion of the job.You will perform Physical review of work progress and quality.You will conduct regular site reviews of all your jobs.There are administrative responsibilities, which include all form of data logging of events and circumstances impacting the job in any way.You may prepare RFPs for subcontractors and perform subcontractor management.You will be responsible for the preparation of RFIs for work engineered externally.

To qualify for this position, you have to have a track record of success as a project manager dealing with industrial automation systems integration and have installed systems by Modicon, Fanuc, A-B, and Siemens. You have been able to convert ladder diagrams to cable schedules and conduit schematics in your sleep. If you go deeper and PLC and interface programming experience and have worked hand-on with software from Rockell, WonderWare, Siemens (PCS7), C++ or DeltaV, those are assets you can sell to us.

A FEW OTHER TIDBITS

Most constructors are operationally driven. We have a balanced approach that has the drive coming from the engineering and operational managers. All the systems we are using to support our business process were designed to support outstanding field performance. The way engineering can lead a field force is to provide superior drawings that are detailed for construction and geared for the real construction environment and circumstances. That is exactly where we are headed, and in some division we have achieved that. 

Between the shop drawings and CAD layout detail drawings, some of our field crews are getting “installable prints”. Our goal has been to perform the engineering up front so that we can supply operations with complete, unambiguous plans throughout a construction. We are getting better every day and will press on with efforts at refinement until the systems and staff doing the work is evolved as far as they can be evolved. Not only does this speed up the work, but less experienced professionals can be more effective with perfect and comprehensive drawings in hand. The clients are not only getting the benefit of an exceptionally well engineered job, but those comprehensive drawings allow us to deliver that job for less money. Find me a client that does not understand better job, and schedule integrity for less money?

The company has always and will always personally support people who reach out for us. We do not have a formal sales team here, though the marketing types are doing their jobs as are the bid and proposal managers.

The company leadership is visionary and has consistently identified new markets and ways to approach those markets, but it is our division managers and project managers that do our general business development work. When they succeed at business development work, they are personally rewarded. Read that: We write big checks to the project managers that find and bring in new work.

While operating in the most competitive electrical and systems construction environment around, we have retained our senior managers. That tells you all you need to know about professional consideration and financial reward here. Obviously we are paying them enough. We will not loose track of what you have done, and it will not go unrewarded.

There is real delegation of authority to managers here. We expect senior managers to do their jobs with global directions rather than micro-management. You will be a P&L responsible manager and will have direct visibility into all matters of productivity and cost. Your coworkers will be competent professionals. A part of our success can be attributed to “client-friendliness”. We are easy to do business with and make sure we are easy to work with. That is a mission, not an accident.  We also try to make it easy to work with one another. We encourage professional consideration. The quality of the people you will team with is going to be high enough for personal friendships to grow out of business relationships.

LOCATION

This is exceptionally good news. We have significant facilities in a number of Virginia locations, but we can situate you in north west Virginia near the West Virginia panhandle. Nice housing in nice neighborhoods with good schools are very modest in price here, hovering at about the average in terms of cost of living index for the nation as a whole BUT what we pay relative to that housing is better than the average for the nation for equivalent positions. What that means is good local salary buying power. We have without even natural beauty, a mild four season’s climate and easy access to the best from big metro areas to great hunting and fishing. The federal government is constantly expanding and we are just seeing that creep into our area. As that expansion evolves, so will go the housing prices. The programs that will fuel this are already signed into law. A buck invested in this real estate market will be worth double what a buck invested elsewhere in the housing market will be worth.

PAY, PERKS, BENEFITS

The salary will be negotiated based upon qualifications such as differences in experience and skills. We have divisional profit sharing, a 401K with match, and merit bonus considerations. Great medical, dental vision plan with first tier providers. Division profit will be the basis for performance bonus, and this can be a very significant portion of total compensation. If you prove to be a business developer, that will have a positive impact on income.  A car allowance or vehicle will be provided after the training. Cell phone, laptop, and the tools necessary to do a first class job are part of the package. We will move a right fit person.

CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION

We set up an outside consultant that can answer questions for you. The rules are simple: He is not allowed to pass anything, not even your name, back to us without your permission. Please send a note, project list and resume information or whatever reflects your professional standing. We have not had deals fall apart because of money, so a conversation with qualified people has always proven valuable. If the fit is good for everybody, we will get to talking about the money.

EMAIL: propower@hughes.net

SUBJECT LINE:  SYSTEMAUTO