Heavy/Civil and Aggregate Producing Companies (HCAPC) have been working with nearly the same technology solutions for close to 30 years. While the market has been slow to evolve and transition, over the last five years there have been positive signs of movement. As several problems within the HCAPC tech stack were identified, a flood of new solutions in the industry for trucking, fuel, and equipment became available. This compounded the integration issues while also began to provide tremendous opportunity for improvement.

The Problem

For many years, the HCAPC had three primary solutions: an ERP solution for accounting, a scale ticketing solution for weigh-out or batching, and an estimating solution for bidding. These solutions did not evolve quickly and could be integrated to move data from one to the other as needed though the technology to do so was basic. When an upgrade occurred and broke an integration, it could be fixed and relied upon for another 6 months to a year. All of this was occurring on a contractor’s data center so there were minimal issues with Cloud security, and the software vendor community maintained these integrations with other solutions though somewhat reluctantly.

Today we have many more applications that either produce data for consumption in the ERP (e.g., fuel transactions that need to go to inventory) or require data for validation or a downstream function (e.g., trucking tickets for trucking vouchers). Since many software developers, new and old, have not anticipated a robust architecture for integration, you have the makings of an inefficient solution “stack” that is a mixture of efficient applications banded together by Excel spreadsheets and batch uploads. And the vendor community has either given up on maintaining all these integrations or fobbed it off to the contractor to maintain it within the IT department.

The Survey

In order to provide some visibility to the current state of automation and provide a foundation for some speculation, an automation survey was developed and distributed to heavy/civil contractors late last year. The survey was produced by Burger Consulting Group (BCG) and distributed to the firm’s HCAP clients as well as friends and customers from Viewpoint, Command Alkon, TACInsight, and CFMA. Respondents consisted of approximately 50 companies representing a large number of operating companies. The survey questions focused on both functions automated and solutions deployed, with some questions focused on the importance of the quote-to-cash process and priority for automating those processes.  

Results

The respondents were largely privately held with less than 5% being publicly traded companies. Those few public firms did make up a large proportion of the plants and quarries in the responses but did not ultimately skew the automation questions. There was also a wide distribution from around the US and Canada though fewer west coast companies responding for some reason.

One of the telling results from the survey was the level of IT staffing by size of firm. If you ignore the $1 billion public firms who are well staffed, many of the small- to mid-sized firms have maintenance level crews in IT. This does not bode well for the industry in general as more IT professionals are needed to help automate and keep pace. 

Perhaps one of the more startling results from the survey was the number of firms not using a Material Sales application in their ERP. Vista, Spectrum and JDE Edwards were the most prominent ERP solutions mentioned among the respondents and each of those does have a Material Sales application. But that does not necessarily mean each of the respondents has it implemented, as evidenced by the responses. This would be a concern and also an opportunity for improvement for many of the respondents. All HCAPC, at least those that make and sell material, should have Material Sales implemented. This is the “point of entry” if you will to the ERP solution for all scale ticket and batch data. Without that application, ticket data would have to be posted into multiple locations within the ERP.