About Heritage Mechanical

Heritage Mechanical is a full-service HVAC, plumbing, and refrigeration contractor based in Crofton, Maryland and specializing in large commercial and institutional facilities across the mid-Atlantic region. With an in-house pipe fabrication facility supporting their field crews, Heritage recognized the need to modernize its fabrication workflow and recently came online with PypeServer Cloud+.

Below is an interview with Fabrication Manager Randy Mozingo exploring Heritage’s journey toward a fully integrated shop using PypeServer Cloud+.

Heritage Mechanical specializes in building large commercial and institutional facilities across the mid-Atlantic. How does your commitment to adding new technology help you maintain the level of service your clients expect?
In commercial and institutional environments, there’s very little room for error. Whether we’re fabricating mechanical rooms for a new critical facility, prefabbing high-rise plumbing rough-in, or supporting a refrigeration retrofit at an occupied facility, our clients expect quality and they expect it on time. If a spool package comes out wrong or shows up late, it doesn’t just affect one trade, it can impact the entire project schedule and that would reflect poorly on Heritage.

Investing in Cloud+ is about investing in reliability to support our field operations. When the FAB Shop is working from accurate, model-driven cut lists instead of handwritten dimensions, it improves the quality and accuracy of every assembly that leaves this shop, and that’s what keeps our field crews on schedule. That is what our clients expect from Heritage Mechanical, and it’s what we expect from ourselves — staying committed to quality work and technology is how we build our path to being a leader in our industry.

Before PypeServer, what did your typical software “stack” look like, and at what point in the workflow did you usually encounter the most friction?
Honestly, our ‘stack’ before Cloud+ was mostly paper. The VDC team would produce spool drawings, and we’d print a paper spool sheet for each assembly and hand it off to the workstations. Every cut length, every fitting callout, the fabricator was reading it off that sheet and marking pipe by hand. There was no system tying any of it together.

Spool tracking was difficult. Once those paper sheets hit the floor, you had no idea where a spool was in the process. Was it cut? Was it assembled? Was it waiting on a fitting? You had to physically walk the shop and ask somebody to find out. If a spool sheet got misread or a dimension was written wrong, you might not find out until the assembly was already built and didn’t fit in the field. By then you’ve burned labor twice: once building it wrong and once fixing it. There was no digital thread from the model to the floor, and no easy way to know at any given moment what was done and what wasn’t.

Every shop reaches a point where they realize a gap needs to be filled. What specific challenges or bottlenecks first made you consider PypeServer Cloud+?
There were two things that happened around the same time. First, we landed a large government project with a very high density of fittings. I knew right away that our manual process wasn’t going to scale for that job — we’d either have to hire more people and add assembly stations, or accept real schedule risk. None of those were good options.

Second, I attended the MCAA Innovation Conference and met David Basiji (PypeServer’s CEO). He walked me through the features of Cloud+ and it clicked immediately. When David showed me how spool data flows directly from the model to the cut station and assembly floor — with status tracking built in — I thought, that’s exactly what we’re missing. We weren’t just looking for a faster way to do what we were doing. We needed a system that connected every step of the process and gave us visibility we simply didn’t have with paper.

Many contractors worry that new software will cause weeks of shop downtime. Can you walk us through the Cloud+ bring-up process—how long did it take for your team to feel “up to speed”?
Two weeks, start to finish — and that’s coming from a team with no previous fabrication software experience whatsoever. I was honestly expecting a much longer road.

What made the difference was the PypeServer onboarding team. Derek, Ricky, and Amy were with us every step of the way, and the process was seamless. One thing I was particularly concerned about was disrupting our VDC workflow — but our VDC team didn’t have to change a thing about the way they spooled. Cloud+ fit right into what they were already doing. That removed a huge potential roadblock right out of the gate.

On the FAB side, our team was proficient within the first week. They took to it faster than I anticipated. By week two we were running live jobs with full confidence. No downtime, no parallel paper tracking. If you’re holding off on Cloud+ because you’re worried about the disruption, I’d tell you that concern goes away fast once you’re in the onboarding process with that team.