Texas Construction Firm Undergoes a Digital Transformation

Digital advisory firm Sparkhound published a case study on construction firm Pavecon’s digital transformation earlier this week. The transition involved moving payroll, job rating, and customer scheduling all to a digital platform, which it says will improve productivity and reduce paper wastage.

Pavecon, like most medium-sized construction firms, still relied on pen and paper for all accountancy. A foreman would recall all crew operations and payroll for the week. The information would then be sent to the accounting department, which would manually file thousands of documents each week for processing.

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While the system has been used for decades, it is rife with inefficiencies and is a slow process. “The foremen were scheduling crew members, ordering the concrete or asphalt, and reserving the needed equipment all in manual, pen and paper format. Pavecon needed to improve the process and create a solid platform to evolve the company into the next business phase,” said Pavecon president, Daniel Kilman.

The transformation to digital started with a backbone of Microsoft Azure, which included Office 365, SharePoint, Azure SQL database, Active Directory, and Power BI. The inclusion of PowerApps also allowed Sparkhound to build for all three major platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows.

Sparkhound then built three digital services for Pavecon:

1. An integrated payroll system that turned 13 processing steps into a simple click.
2. A job-rating program that simplifies the rating process and massively reduces paper wastage.
3. A customer value creation scheduling system that provides instant feedback from customers.

Throughout all of the digital transformation, Sparkhound pursued a goal of making services easy to use for all employees. This way, employees will not need any advanced training to start using the new platforms.

“Sparkhound has provided us with a solid platform that prepares Pavecon for future growth. Whether it is a new division, a brick-and-mortar location or helping capture additional market share, there are all kinds of ways to look at a growing company and now we can leverage the best systems to help us do this,” said Kilman.