Ryan Seeley

Ryan Seeley is always on the move.

An electrician for 13 years, the New York native started his own company in 2019 and hit the road installing large-scale electrical systems in Walmarts all over the country. 

“I’ve pretty much lived on the road and in hotels for most of my life,” he said. “In 2019 alone, I worked in 27 different states.”

He was speaking over the phone between things (“how long is this call going to take?”) from his home base in Cumming, GA, where his current employer is headquartered.

At 34, Seeley has leveled up to a construction manager for RavenVolt, a supplier of turn-key micro-grid solutions that builds and installs electrical infrastructure—everything from generators and switch gears to solar arrays and on-site batteries—in commercial and industrial facilities all over the nation.

These days he spends about 75% of his time in place, handling managerial duties from Cumming. For the other 25%, he’s back on the road, overseeing major electrical infrastructure projects for major retail clients.

Seeley has many responsibilities as a construction manager for RavenVolt, but one of the most challenging when he first arrived at the job in 2021 was inventory management.

“We use more power tools here at RavenVolt than any company I’ve ever been part of,” Seeley said.

Constantly growing, Seeley’s inventory as of this writing spans 746 assets, ranging from power tools and batteries to larger items like generators and pipe-heaters.

Keeping track of all those assets while constantly on the move was a nightmare until Seeley and his work crews started using ONE-KEY™, Milwaukee Tool’s free and easy-to-use inventory management app. One-Key creates a digital space for your physical tools to “live” in, allowing multiple users to customize, track, and manage entire inventories in-field, from the screen of their computer or mobile device.

Since adopting it at the beginning of 2023, One-Key has become an essential tool for Seeley and his 25 workers. Broken out into four work crews, each member of Seeley’s team has the One-Key app on their phone, enabling them to quickly scan the tool inventory of the work truck that they’re assigned to at the beginning of each day.

All of Seeley’s power tools—divvied out across nine box trucks and a smattering of company F-250s—are Milwaukee® red, with anywhere between 10 to 35 tools per truck.  Of those, roughly 70 are from the One-Key line, meaning they have IoT tracking and customization capabilities built-in.

The rest are affixed with a Bluetooth Tracking Tag, secured to the tools with epoxy and small screws, Seeley said.  One-Key’s solution for making virtually any item trackable, the tags can pinpoint the location of an object within 300 feet of a mobile device running the One-Key app, and come equipped with a tiny speaker that users can “ring” when within a 50-foot range. The trackers are small, lightweight, and highly durable, housed within a weatherproof shell that’s designed to withstand the harsh conditions of any jobsite.   

One-Key has a variety of cloud-based features, including inventory management, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tool tracking, geofencing, job costing, tool setting customization, and remote tool lock-out. Which features get most utilized by a particular user depends on that user’s unique needs.

For Seeley, One-Key performs two primary functions. The first is organizational.

In the fast-paced world of commercial and industrial construction, power tools can get mixed up pretty fast, sometimes seeming to vanish as they shift hands across teams and jobsites. If unaddressed, this situation can lead to feelings of frustration among members of a work crew, as Seeley can attest to.

“Nobody was using the word ‘steal’ but a lot of the accusations were that somebody took a tool off the truck after hours.”

Those days of frustration are long gone now that Seeley and his teams have a quick and easy method for organizing and pinpointing the locations of their tools at the beginning of every shift.

“Ever since I implemented One-Key, I don’t get any complaints that somebody else has my tool, and I used to get at least one of those types of complaints every day,” Seeley said.

“With a couple clicks of the mouse, I can tell you exactly what truck your tool is on. People are more comfortable letting others borrow tools for the week, knowing where it is, and that they will definitely get it back.”

The second primary function that One-Key performs for Seeley is quality assurance through data collection. More specifically: torque reports.

Workers at RavenVolt routinely have to install heavy-duty mechanical lugs, the landing points for high-voltage electrical wires. It’s critical to the safety of the workers and the building’s occupants that these mechanical lugs are securely fastened in place every time. With an arsenal of One-Key digital torque wrenches, Seeley’s work crews can automatically generate and store torque reports from within the field, creating a digital record of precisely how much torque was applied to each individual lug.

“Any time you have a loose connection, you can cause a fire or an explosion. People can die if these lugs aren’t torqued,” Seeley explained. “We also aren’t the only people to work in the gear, so having a torque report will allow future workers to have comfort in the fact that the equipment they’re working in is installed correctly and safely.”

With One-Key in his back pocket, Seeley and his team can rest easy between jobs knowing that all of their relevant tool and inventory data can be easily captured, stored, and shared on the move.