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Software Tool Streamlines Business Operations
With the challenging market conditions in the construction industry, Mid-State Paving & Excavation, located in central Pennsylvania, needed to re-evaluate its operations to remain a leader in its region. Steven Pope, Mid-State’s administrative manager, found larger companies were bidding on smaller jobs than in the past, and workers that had been laid off were starting their own businesses and picking up smaller work. Pope knew Mid-State needed to streamline its business processes and improve productivity.
Mid-State, a $3 million company that employs approximately 40 people in the office and field at peak production times, handled its business with a generic accounting package, a separate payroll system and Maxwell Systems Quest for estimating. With the combination of software applications and spreadsheets, Mid-State was limited to tracking lump sum hours and was wasting time by re-entering data in several places.
“We were using an off-the-shelf accounting software package and felt it was very limited and less than what we needed, and using another solution for payroll was a nightmare,” Pope says. “Our processes were time-intensive and prone to error. We needed a more powerful solution that could provide job cost tracking from the estimate through the project management process and billing; as well as more efficient payroll and better control.”
Mid-State turned to Maxwell Systems to help the company take the next step.
“We needed to look to the future,” Pope says. “It was a no brainer to grow our relationship and go with Maxwell Systems ProContractorMX.”
ProContractorMX is a complete construction software solution that provides end-to-end control of critical business operations from takeoff and estimating through job cost accounting and project management, and ultimately for critical reporting and analysis.
Steve Wagner, the owner of Mid-State Paving, also believes in the power of an all-in-one solution. “We wanted to get the software to be a better company,” Wagner says. “We wanted to analyze our costs better and be more competitive.”
Quick and Accurate Bidding
Mid-State recently changed its bidding philosophy from one that focused on a specific bid item to one that is based on how they will build the project and points to WBS codes for specific assemblies during the bid creation. Pope says the software fits their process.
“Being able to include visual assemblies and list of crews are powerful features,” he says. “Before, we did this all on a unit basis in a spreadsheet that was set up for each different bid item and then merged them to create the estimate.”
Since Mid-State was bidding larger projects with its site work services, it had outgrown its simplified spreadsheets. “ProContractorMX allows us to have much more detail,” Pope says. “We no longer need to enter the same materials over and over again and can easily pull materials and crews in for each estimate.” The estimators and project managers at Mid-State agree with Pope that the software saves them a lot of time.
“Our estimates are so much more accurate, and we can negotiate better (now) that we know our exact costs,” says Brad Keiser, a Mid-State estimator and project manager.
Improving Payroll
Payroll was another major challenge for Mid-State. In addition to requiring a significant amount of unnecessary data entry with its previous system, the firm’s public works projects require compliance with the Davis-Bacon Act by paying prevailing wages. This requirement adds another level of complexity to the payroll process for contractors, and as a solution tailored to the needs of construction, ProContractorMX offers Davis-Bacon-certified payroll reporting, along with workers compensation and benefit tracking to streamline processes.
The new solution automatically calculates earnings, benefits, fringes, insurance liabilities and taxes, as well as other features. Pope says the software condenses what used to be a three-step process down to a one-step process.
“This saves us about 30 percent of our payroll personnel’s time when entering payroll data,” he says. “Before, it would take about two days to process our bi-weekly payroll. Now, with ProContractorMX, it takes about a half of a day, is more accurate and requires less calculating and data entry.”
Lori Fisher, a Mid-State employee who handles payroll and administration, says the software offers less room for errors.
“It is much simpler because I’m entering one time, and it is doing the calculations for me and printing out the reports,” Fisher says. “I don’t have to enter anything separate, whether it is a Davis Bacon prevailing wage job or whether it is a regular hourly job.”
Gaining Control
On the accounting side, it is all about control.
“With (Mid-State’s) old off-the-shelf accounting software solution, it was tough to manipulate, add or get reports out. It had its limitations,” Pope says.
ProContractorMX synchronizes project costs and ongoing changes with hard financial data, Pope says. “We have redeveloped our general ledger structure to give us much greater control,” he says. “There is no comparison with the control between the two programs. With (the old) accounting software solution, our users could go in and change or delete transactions, leaving much room for mistakes and lack of accountability and data integrity. However, with ProContractorMX, the structure of the program guides the user to follow certain important procedures. It is all automated and provides a complete audit trail, and the security features enable us to lock down any part of the application we choose.”
Pope says the software enables Mid-State Paving to know its daily costs two weeks quicker than with its previous methods. It also gives them the ability to do daily costs versus waiting for payroll to be processed.
“One-time data entry is a huge time saver,” he says.
With cost of completion data, Mid-State is easily able to determine if they are over or under on billings. “Since we are now working on larger jobs than in the past, cost of completion and work-in-progress details are much more important,” Pope says. “This information helps us to better know where we are on a job and enable us to look at quantity of completion and price per unit and get a cost of completion—ultimately providing us better insight into the profit or loss on a project.”
The history with audit trails helps aid in decision making on the production side. Mid-State wasn’t doing any production analysis with its previous system. Now with ProContractorMX, they can look at historical information to understand job performance and make improvements on future jobs.
Getting a Complete Picture
The job costing component of ProContractorMX strongly appealed to Mid-State Paving. With one solution, the contractor is able to manage change orders, budgets and burdened labor—and do on-screen comparisons to manage profitability throughout the project.
“Analyzing costs is always important, but in an economy where there is more competition and bids must be tighter, it is even more critical for us,” Pope says. “Having up-to-date job cost information is so critical to our company, allowing us to make changes as quickly as possible to help be profitable or to cut losses … It also gives us a lot more ability to track costs from the estimate right up through the end of our billing cycle, the end of the project, in a much more controlled manner with a much better audit trail.” Mid-State Paving & Excavation plans to continue to expand its use of ProContractorMX to further streamline its processes.
“All the tools of the trade are there,” Pope says. “ProContractorMX is comprehensive, and we can grow with it."
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