In 2022, Atlas Excavating automated its accounting data into the financial workflows and pre-built dashboards within ProNovos’ cloud-based platform. The goal was to bolster profits by making better use of the company’s existing construction data.
Based in West Lafayette, Indiana, the heavy civil contracting firm specializes in pipe and dirt, with a payroll of about 150 people and annual revenues of approximately $60 million.
A 32-year veteran of the construction industry, Atlas President & CEO Casey Dillon still used paper and pencil to keep track of company and project information when he joined his family’s multigenerational construction business in 1990.
Over the years, construction tech became a bigger part of the picture at Atlas. For example, the company adopted AGTEK, HCSS HeavyBid, Foundation Accounting Software and Procore. It also began flying drones for some of its site inspections.
These various technologies were effective, but they were not designed to give decision-makers at the firm actionable insights at a higher level.
Data overload was another issue.
“We eventually were creating such an abundance of data that we struggled to interpret it all,” Dillon noted. “We probably had 1,000 spreadsheets that we maintained. We had all these Google Docs shared throughout the whole company. It was like, ‘Well, it’s out there someplace—if you can find it.’” Pulling data to create those spreadsheets also was “incredibly manual, slow and subject to mistakes,” Dillon added.
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We probably had 1,000 spreadsheets that we maintained. We had all these Google Docs shared throughout the whole company. It was like, ‘Well, it’s out there someplace—if you can find it.’
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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We probably had 1,000 spreadsheets that we maintained. We had all these Google Docs shared throughout the whole company. It was like, ‘Well, it’s out there someplace—if you can find it.’
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
Traditionally, many analytics firms have taken multiple weeks or even months to execute data-integration at construction contracting firms. With its Analytics Marketplace, ProNovos sought to change that paradigm. The Marketplace is essentially a one-stop-shop packed with off-the-shelf dashboards designed to hit the ground running with data from Foundation and other leading construction software providers.
ProNovos’ goal in offering the subscription service was to lower contractors’ implementation times and costs, empowering them to achieve their goals faster than before.
Broadly speaking, Atlas turned to ProNovos for assistance with:
To start making progress toward these objectives, ProNovos encouraged Atlas to take advantage of two related concepts that are fundamental to the apps in the ProNovos Analytics Marketplace—data warehousing and data visualization.
The former allows contractors to pull in data from accounting, project-management and other systems for automated analysis. The latter centers on presenting real-time views of construction data in attractive, graphical formats that quickly convey trends in areas such as labor hours, sales, billings, change orders, projected final cost and AP & AR.
Dillon expressed satisfaction with the speed and accuracy of the ProNovos rollout.
“When ProNovos says you can be up and running in 48 hours, I can vouch for that,” the executive said. “We gave them our credentials and they logged us in and then exported our data into their cloud-based system. We were up and running and ready to get live data out to our PMs and estimators very quickly.”
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When ProNovos says you can be up and running in 48 hours, I can vouch for that.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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When ProNovos says you can be up and running in 48 hours, I can vouch for that.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
Prior to utilizing ProNovos’ Project Billings Analysis, some of the younger project managers at Atlas periodically struggled with the subtleties of efficient cash-management. And with PMs overseeing multiple jobs at once, staying on top of billing status and keeping projects cash-positive could be a challenge even for more experienced personnel.
The Project Billings Analysis is designed to give teams all the information they need to properly bill their projects and maintain a healthy cash flow. It offers:
Like construction CEOs everywhere, Dillon has always emphasized being aggressive on billing. However, the actual big-picture effects of particular parts of the equation—like payment lags by specific owners—can be hard for younger PMs, in particular, to gauge. Even on a project that seems comfortably over-billed on the 30th of the month, Dillon explains, cash could still run behind if the owner takes 60 days to pay.
But a simple graphic created by ProNovos clarified things for some of those PMs. It shows the relative positions over time of cash, costs and billing in blue, green and black lines. Dillon lightheartedly calls this “the money graph” because of its impact on PMs’ understanding.
“It’s powerful,” the CEO said. “It really showed our guys why some of these jobs were still negative cash. They could see at a glance how much they needed to bill as well as average lead times for customers. As a result, we improved our cash position by about $1 million in 45 days.”
Today, Atlas is making progress toward its goal of keeping 100 percent of its projects cash-positive throughout. “We’re making a difference,” Dillon said. “The PMs can see this data live every day as it’s coming in. They can check it themselves instead of talking to accounting and asking somebody to run reports.”
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It’s powerful. As a result, we improved our cash position by about $1 million in 45 days.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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It’s powerful. As a result, we improved our cash position by about $1 million in 45 days.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
Dillon also appreciates the way data visualizations allow for quicker recognition of billing status. “ProNovos will highlight that billing green if it has been sent out, red if it hasn’t, and gray if it’s out but not yet approved,” he said. “In one simple place I can see the billing status on the job. It used to take much more work and time to determine if we were getting our bills out the door.”
Seeking accurate and accessible insights into the financial health of its projects, Atlas also rolled out ProNovos’ Work-in-Progress (WIP) reporting and analysis application.
This tool automatically aggregates all project financial data without any manual exporting or calculating. It allows contractors to track key performance metrics such as profit margin, earned revenue and over/under billings.
Busy construction executives need an efficient way to stay on top of key metrics on multiple projects. ProNovos’ WIP tool allows them to quickly spot where projects are in trouble, whether from cost overruns or under-billings. They can also filter through the WIP report by a desired timeframe, geography, project manager and project type to identify company-wide trends or their most successful projects.
Dillon also points to shortcomings in the traditional approach to WIP reporting, in which project data is pulled out of the accounting system on a particular day, then combined into the WIP report and finally discussed with PMs days or weeks later.
“In our office, we used to make a WIP once a month. We would share it with everybody and for the next 30 days, it was gospel,” he explained. “But the reality is that construction changes every day. The WIP is 100 percent accurate the day it is produced. A week or two later, it is not a great indicator.”
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In one simple place I can see the billing status on the job. It used to take much more work and time to determine if we were getting our bills out the door.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
By contrast, the automated WIP created by ProNovos is populated with live, continually updated data. “ProNovos is essentially giving us daily WIP reporting,” Dillon said.
Real-time data is also at the core of another ProNovos analysis tool adopted by Atlas—the Projected Final Costs feature. Used by PMs, controllers and execs alike, it allows Atlas to:
Dillon is looking forward to capturing enough data to start seeing project trends more clearly–up to and including making predictions about current or prospective jobs.
“Every contractor has had jobs that didn’t go precisely according to plan,” he said. “Maybe those cost codes were missed in the estimate because production was too slow or due to certain field conditions. With this tool, we can start to flag those different reasons and root causes on each project. That’s going to give us data that we can later go back and analyze—an across-the-board summation of where we can improve as an organization.”
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ProNovos is essentially giving us daily WIP reporting.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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ProNovos is essentially giving us daily WIP reporting.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
Atlas uses ProNovos’ Labor Hours Analysis tool to identify trends in labor activity and performance—including seeing how actual hours are tracking against budgeted hours. By identifying potential overruns, the contractor is better able to take corrective action and stay on budget.
Field personnel use the tool to make sure they are coding time to the right activities. The dashboard shows a curve of hours spent on the project and allows users such as subs and foremen to identify where disruptions occur—a critical part of making sure Atlas is properly compensated on jobs with start-and-stop dynamics.
“Ideally, you move in, you do your work, and you leave, but jobsite disruptions of up to three months can and do happen,” Dillon said. “The graphic presentations in this tool make it super-obvious why you might need, for example, a time extension from that owner.”
While data on labor hours come out of the accounting system and can be pulled together in spreadsheets, the visualizations created by ProNovos are available at the touch of a button. “It’s a big improvement,” Dillon said.
Atlas uses ProNovos’ Job Costs report to track project costs and identify and deal with overruns before they get out of hand. The tool gives PMs, engineers and superintendents handy visualizations designed to help them make accurate projections.
Designed as a holistic grid, it breaks down projects by phase, cost code, and cost class into budget, job cost to date, percentage complete, and cost remaining for each line item. “It tells you everything you need to know about individual jobs and also lets you see which are your best customers,” Dillon noted.
Along the same lines, both PMs and execs need to understand how change orders affect project profitability. Using ProNovos’ Company Change Order Report has given Atlas some new insights in this area. The tool offers micro and macro views on CO-impacts related to contracts, budgets and profit margin.
When Atlas first ran analytics on its change orders earlier this year, Dillon and his colleagues were surprised to have identified a total of about 500 individual COs or more than $5 million in extra work. Given how busy some of the PMs were with these unplanned tasks, they had assumed Atlas had taken on an unmanageable pipeline after the Covid 19 lockdowns.
“We saw in ProNovos that, in fact, we hadn’t taken too many jobs,” Dillon explained. “We had just underestimated how much change-order work we were doing, along with how much effort that takes.”
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It tells you everything you need to know about individual jobs and also lets you see which are your best customers.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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It tells you everything you need to know about individual jobs and also lets you see which are your best customers.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
The new dashboard shows change orders by year, active jobs, active close, approval status and more, with filters for individual project managers. “It allows us to see, right away, if we’re doing change orders to lose money or make money,” Dillon said. “Our PMs are learning where they need to focus.”
Filtering CO data for specific PMs has been an eye-opener as well. “Seeing that a particular PM has done $2 million in COs this year helps you realize why that PM has been stressed out,” Dillon said. “Now you can step in and help.”
Lastly, Dillon is using the ProNovos Executive Dashboard to see all the pertinent information he and his team need to run the company efficiently. It gives big-picture trends in areas such as gross profit, profit margins, backlog, outstanding AR and AP, and cash balance. Atlas can see current employee headcount and monitor payroll over time, with the ability to view information by department and project. “The Executive Dashboard puts all of this in one place,” Dillon said. “Instead of having my controller produce six or seven reports, I can call up this data on my iPad, and it’s live.”
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It allows us to see, right away, if we’re doing change orders to lose money or make money. Our PMs are learning where they need to focus.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
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It allows us to see, right away, if we’re doing change orders to lose money or make money. Our PMs are learning where they need to focus.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas
Teaching construction financial management is an unofficial part of the job for C-suite executives at contracting firms–after all, they can’t achieve maximum profitability until their PMs know fundamentals like profit fade and over- and under-billing inside and out.
But as Dillon sees it, some busy field personnel never seem to get any “aha!” moments after staring at rows and columns in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
“In my mind, the educational benefits are an important and underappreciated part of analytics,” he said. “You’re got all of this data coming in. You want non-financial people to be able to consume and use it. I’ve got super-smart, younger PMs who just don’t have 25 or 30 years of experience in cash-management or other parts of the business. Analytics helps them understand where they’re at on their projects—and they can take that understanding into their day-to-day responsibilities and negotiations.”
Finally, ProNovos has delivered on another important concept for Dillon and Atlas—time-to-value.
In this case, that means implementing the software quickly so Atlas can reap value from it right away, and shrinking the gap between identifying problems and fixing them.
A linebacker in high school who attended college on a football scholarship, Dillon points to the way good coaches review footage with players right after the game. “You want to shorten the timetable from the actual event to when you learn the lesson, because that makes you less likely to repeat mistakes.”
The best coaches are also straight shooters about the facts they uncover.
“As an organization, we get better if we’re honest with ourselves about where we goofed up and how we can improve,” Dillon said, “and that’s part of what analytics helps us accomplish.”
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You’re got all of this data coming in. You want non-financial people to be able to consume and use it. I’ve got super-smart, younger PMs who just don’t have 25 or 30 years of experience in cash-management or other parts of the business. Analytics helps them understand where they’re at on their projects—and they can take that understanding into their day-to-day responsibilities and negotiations.
Casey Dillon
President & CEO, Atlas Excavating
