IOC Construction Continues its Fast Growth Thanks to Acumatica & Strategies Group
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About IOC Construction
Industry
Construction: Do-It-All General Contractor serving Greater Chicago and Milwaukee Areas
Number of Employees
Approx. 100 full and part-time employees
Location
Greater Chicago and Milwaukee with headquarters in Batavia, IL
Products
Acumatica Advanced Construction Edition with:
- Advanced Job Cost Accounting
- Fixed Assets
- Order Management
- Intercompany Accounting
- Field Service
- Project Management
- Expense Management
- CRM
A Deep Dive into IOC's Connected Solution
Managing a growing construction firm with QuickBooks and Salesforce can prove a bit tricky, especially when more companies are added over several decades. Typically, siloed applications are adopted and bolted on, and manual data entry balloons to unmanageable levels.
“We started off as a small handyman painting company and over time layered on a roofing company, a siding company, and then we figured out that we needed a company to house all of the corporate employees that oversaw the three companies,” says Joel Sisto, Chief Financial Officer of IOC Construction. “Before we knew it, we had four separate instances of QuickBooks that didn’t talk to each other. And along with that, we used Salesforce to bring all of it together.”
But consolidating and reconciling data wasn’t easy.
The Batavia, IL-based company manages commercial construction projects from start to finish, from construction to roofing to painting and maintenance for multi-family, commercial high-rise, and industrial complexes. IOC Construction also offers maintenance services to medical facilities and property management to commercial property owners.
“Because our systems didn’t talk to each other, intercompany data was unbelievably difficult to maintain,” Sisto says. “Missing an entry in one company but not in another, became a humongous headache for us.”
At quarters and year-end, reconciliations were painful. A construction project that included roofing and painting would be represented in three QuickBooks instances, and allocating costs for any one project was error-prone, Sisto says, and “Reconciliation was a nightmare.”
“Salesforce was where we brought it all together,” he continues. “At the end of these projects, we were using Salesforce as a gross income measurement tool, which was a really bad idea because it was all these different systems didn’t talk to each other, and didn’t really reconcile, which created numbers that may or may not be correct.”
“It was a mess,” adds Jessica Hill, ERP Manager. “There were six of us who daily entered data into all platforms. Hardly anything ever matched.”
David Benning, Chief Executive Officer, summarizes the challenges: “The complexity of our accounting setup was a black box of unknowns and bad data. We were trying to use various systems not as they were intended but in an overly complex way. We didn’t know how bad the data actually was because the data itself was entered inconsistently.”
Add in the fact that QuickBooks lacks financial controls and allows anyone to make changes freely, and it’s easy to envision the resulting chaos.
IOC hired a consultant that evaluated several ERPs including Microsoft Dynamics and Sage 300, while also reviewing other applications like the latest version of Salesforce. But once the consultant demoed Acumatica to IOC, executives stopped looking at other options.
Acumatica Advanced Construction Edition is a modern, all-in-one platform that includes robust financials, job cost accounting, project management, payroll, inventory, order management, field service management, equipment management, route optimization, CRM, mobile access, and AIA invoicing.
“It was undeniable that Acumatica was the thing that we needed because it allowed us to do intercompany transfers,” Sisto says. “It allowed us to bring CRM into the same program where the accounting and the projects rested, and it allowed us to maintain a client list all in one place that could then be utilized by all of the different modules in the system.”
Having everything in one system was also more affordable. “Having multiple Salesforce systems was becoming ungodly expensive the way that we were using it,” he adds.
IOC worked with Strategies Group as its Acumatica consultant. Based in Atlanta, GA with customers nationwide, Strategies Group specializes in helping construction firms transition to modern technology platforms. The 40-year-old firm, whose owner grew up working in the construction industry, has expertise in other industries, including manufacturing, distribution and field service. Understanding that construction firms often don’t have IT departments, Strategies employs a dedicated support team that includes experienced solution engineers to provide quick answers to client’s problems.
Consolidated Customer Data
As part of the implementation, IOC consolidated the number of duplicate or triplicate customer accounts into single contacts with all work in a single customer record, which greatly streamlined several workflows while reducing search time.
“We were entering in client’s information 3, 4, or 5 times. Previously, it was a perfectly reasonable thing for us to have a client that needed a roof, some siding, some maintenance work, and some painting,” Sisto says. “When we were doing our data validation to get into Acumatica, I think we started with – I’ll throw out a number – 10,000 items.” The number of customer accounts was greatly reduced by the time they finished, he says.
A large percentage of construction companies don’t understand their financial picture, according to a recent Association of Professional Builders report. But now with the data that Acumatica is providing, IOC isn’t one of them.
“Acumatica has been phenomenal,” Benning says. “We have a really strong grasp on our financial picture, our margins, conversion rates – all those metrics through Acumatica and the data is relatively easy to pull.”
“Getting business insights from performance is pretty nice, anything from conversion rates to tracking,” he says, adding executives view the organization in two buckets: pipeline and performance. “We can look at where things are happening inside of the pipeline. We use widgets to look at where a folder is digitally along the journey of our organization. Then we can look at the performance, which is how profitable each customer is, each property management company, what our margins are and opportunities, and how our sales team is performing.”
Consolidated Four Entities
IOC employees no longer sign in and out of four different instances of QuickBooks or transfer data between instances, which has freed up a lot of their time.
They also no longer track projects using paper files, a practice that surprised Benning when he joined the company in 2022. He recalls seeing a sea of manilla folders when he walked through the production department. “A lot of them were jobs that we had just started. As I was looking around, I was like, are you using manila folders to run your project?” he says. “Before Acumatica, they were physically taking a folder up from sales to estimating, and from estimating to production. You can’t even fathom. Nobody knows how many folders got lost.”
Adds Hill, “With all the non-visible aspects of multiple companies, there was a lot of paper floating around with files everywhere. Having everything in one place allowed us to go paperless, which is a huge benefit.”
“With QuickBooks, it was really, really difficult to figure out what any of these individual entities were really worth because there were so many intercompany transactions,” Sisto says, adding the company handled some 2,500 service orders annually.
Mobile Access for All
Because Acumatica is based in the cloud, IOC employees can view project plans and data no matter where they are. The company has also hired several employees who live out of the country, making anywhere cloud access a must-have.
“If a project manager is out in the field, they can pull up a project the same way that someone in the accounting department, the operations department, an estimator or a salesperson, can,” Sisto says. “With Acumatica, we have a unified voice, a single source of truth where no matter who a customer talks to during a project, it’s all going to be the same data.”
Third Party Apps Extend Functionality
IOC executives also like that Acumatica seamlessly connects with third-party applications and recognizes businesses have unique needs. “We integrated early on with a marketing and transactional email third-party program that Acumatica has a native integration with. And that’s been huge. We’ve been using it for a lot of our transactional emails, but we recently started going live with our nurture email campaigns from a digital marketing experience.”
IOC has built beautifully designed emails inside of the SendGrid application, which is a low code tool, and then sends them out to customers using Acumatica.
Strategies Empowers IOC Employees
IOC made a big investment to empower its employees to learn and use Acumatica, a move that Sisto says shifted its relationship with Strategies Group from a help desk to a trusted partner. “They’re really a trusted partner for us, helping us expand and come up with creative ideas and ways to use the system,” Sisto says. “When we have an issue, Strategies doesn’t just tell us how to solve the problem. They also provide insight into things that we may want to consider, or insight into solving problems that we don’t even know we have.”
“The people there are phenomenal. They’re friendly, and they really understand the construction business,” he adds.
Sisto and Strategies have held two-day hackathons where they tackle problems. “They really use us differently than a lot of people,” says Randy Collins, senior principal at Strategies. “They’re using us to create processes within the software that allow them to get more bang for their buck out of Acumatica, and helping them solve the problems they can’t solve themselves.”
Collins likes Acumatica’s flexibility, its configurability and that the software company invests in the product’s future. “These allow people who are investing in the product to make processes more comparable to the operational systems that customers want versus having to fit whatever is offered in the software,” he says. “Acumatica is uniquely positioned today to provide growing construction companies like IOC with a system that will grow with them for the next 20 plus years.”
Learn About How we Helped IOC Transform their Business
Discover how IOC Construction transformed its operations and achieved exceptional results with Acumatica. From streamlining project management to improving job costing and optimizing material usage, our solutions empowered IOC Construction to excel in the competitive construction market.
Learn how Acumatica helped them enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and achieve their business goals. Explore their story and see how we can deliver the same game-changing results for your business.
