Success story · Construction
Off Paper and Excel. Into One Connected Field Operation.
Vee-Jay Cement, a St. Louis commercial concrete subcontractor with roughly 200 field employees, replaced paper time cards, spreadsheets and an aging database with TrackVia. The company started with clock-in and daily reports, then added equipment and material requests, pump inspections, safety programs, inventory tracking and bid tracking.
Superintendents now review field reports as they are submitted, and job costs are captured closer to the moment work happens.
- About 60years in business
- Roughly 200field employees
- 5TrackVia use cases
Before
- Paper reports
- Excel trackers
- Text-message reporting
- An Access bid database
- Dispatch prints time cards
- A driver carries them to the job
- A foreman fills them out
- Paper comes back at day’s end
- Payroll keys it into the ERP next morning
With TrackVia
- Crew and Vendor Management
- Work Order Management
- Asset and Site Operations
- Safety and Compliance
- Inventory and Materials Control
- A foreman submits the daily report from the job
- Superintendents review it almost in real time
Connected to the company’s ERP and SharePoint.
The challenge
Vee-Jay Cement has been in business for about sixty years, and its processes are specific to how it works. When Jason McIntyre joined, much of that work ran on paper.
A daily report followed a long path. Dispatch printed time cards each morning, a driver carried them to the job, a foreman filled them out, and the paperwork came back at the end of the day. The next morning, someone in payroll keyed it into the ERP system. With a weekly pay cycle and about 200 people in the field, that happened every day. Out-of-town jobs meant chasing photos and screenshots by text.
Off-the-shelf software did not fit. Vee-Jay tried several options and found them too constrained for how the company actually works.
“When I came in, we were doing everything on paper and we had paper everywhere. Paper was in trucks, we had spreadsheets, people were tracking things in Excel that should have been a database, text messages, nothing was being managed or reported.”
The approach
Start with one pain point
Vee-Jay chose TrackVia because it could be configured around the company’s own processes. McIntyre did not try to digitize everything at once. He started with the biggest pain point, fixed it, and moved to the next.
Executive sponsorship helped. Vee-Jay’s controller partnered with him from the start, which kept the work tied to business outcomes, not just convenience.
- 1
Time cards and daily reports
The first application replaced the paper time card with a clock-in and clock-out app. Foremen submit the daily report from the job, and superintendents in the office review it almost in real time. Nobody drives paperwork back to the yard.
The app goes further than a digital time card:
- GPS tagging. Each clock-in and clock-out captures location. Because every job also has a location in TrackVia, the office can compare the two.
- PIN security. Each person clocks in with a PIN, so one worker cannot clock in for another.
- Trend data. The information supports labor cost trends over time.
- 2
Equipment and material requests
Superintendents fill out a form listing the equipment and materials each crew needs for the next day. The night yard crew loads the trucks and checks off each item. If anything is missing, superintendents get a report in the morning, so they can adjust the plan before crews are on site.
- 3
Pump and equipment tracking
Concrete pumps are among Vee-Jay’s most important assets, and each has its own safety and inspection requirements. Operators complete a walk-around inspection before leaving the yard, a site inspection on arrival and an inspection before leaving the job. Each step captures GPS location. Vee-Jay also tracks hours on site, hours pumped and concrete volume.
The same approach covers other serialized equipment, such as skid steers and laser screens. Cost data is exported to the company’s ERP system.
- 4
Safety and compliance
Safety is a top priority at Vee-Jay, and all of it runs on phones at the job site instead of in notebooks or at a computer:
- Site inspections
- Daily job hazard analyses
- Incident and near-miss reporting, logged the same day
- Certification and license tracking, with alerts before expiration
- A “Good Catch” program, built as a public form so any employee can submit a catch with photos and a note, even without the app. Submissions feed an incentive rewards program.
The Good Catch program began with Vee-Jay’s safety department. They asked whether it could be tracked better, and it became a TrackVia public form.
- 5
Inventory and materials
Everything leaving the warehouse is logged, so the yard crew’s loading checklist also records what actually went out. That captures cost for form lumber, rebar and other consumables. It also tracks items that are not job-costed, such as safety glasses and marking paint, so the team knows when to reorder.
In our recent webinar recap, Jason put the stakes plainly: “We live and die on the margins.”
“It gives us close to real time usage on a job instead of just guessing. We’re not guessing anymore.”
- 6
Bid tracking
Bids were tracked in an old Access database that worked but did not give the team the information they needed. Vee-Jay rebuilt bid tracking in TrackVia and is now adding dashboards and KPIs for the bid and estimate process.
“Before, it was just paper everywhere. We had filing cabinets full of reports… now all we have to do is open up a report dashboard, type in the job number, type in the date, and we have everything right there.”
Results
Vee-Jay’s results come from day-to-day operations.
Reports reviewed as they are submitted
Superintendents see daily reports from the field without waiting for paper to come back.
Time cards that support payroll
The first TrackVia application streamlined the time card and payroll process.
Tighter equipment and materials control
Teams know where equipment is and how materials are being used, instead of checking a board and guessing.
Searchable job records
Where the team once searched filing cabinets for a six-month-old report, it now opens a dashboard and enters a job number and date. Photos for each job report export in one step to a SharePoint folder.
Safety work done in the field
Inspections, hazard analyses, near misses and certification alerts happen on a phone.
Vee-Jay’s work continues. The company still uses some paper and Excel, and McIntyre keeps looking for processes to move into TrackVia, usually after hearing colleagues describe work that wastes their time. After about seven years, employees now come to him with ideas.
Advice
Advice from Vee-Jay for other field operations teams
Jason McIntyre, Technology Specialist, Vee-Jay Cement
Start with one pain point.
“Don’t solve the whole operation. Just pick out one small piece.”
Involve the field early.
If crews will not use it, it will not succeed.
Keep it simple on mobile.
Putting in a time card in five or six taps instead of 20 or 30 is a big win for field workers.
Gather feedback and make small changes.
Share small wins with the team to build momentum.
After vetting out several other solutions, TrackVia quickly seemed like a perfect solution for us… Our needs change almost weekly as regulations and the industry evolve, and we needed the flexibility to constantly tweak our platform in real time.
Projects that used to sit delayed for weeks now finish in days or even hours.
With Excel, we couldn’t see what employees were doing. With TrackVia it’s easy to track work and view what exactly has been completed. This resulted in an 80% time savings.
I wound up being able to do the same amount of work with only eight people versus 13 and that became the driving factor for them to accept TrackVia.
We are very pleased with the ease of use of the mobile application. We are thrilled to have instant visibility of the sterilization process and to be able to see immediately where issues are occurring. This enables us to focus on our number one priority, which is our patients and their loved ones.
TrackVia has truly changed the game on software development and deployment. We created and rolled out a mobile workflow app with limited resources in a very short period of time.
Their solution provided the flexibility we needed to meet unique project requirements while affording visibility and control.
TrackVia has improved the accuracy of our data. In the past it was a chore for our coordinators to document issues in real time. Now, they can just open the mobile app or website, check a few boxes and they are done.
The first application I built—it was simple—I think it took 10 minutes.
Become a success story
Increased productivity
Do more work with the same people.
Reduced cost
Less manual work, rework, duplicate entry, and administrative overhead.
Reduced risk
Better compliance, evidence, accountability, and auditability.
Improved performance
Faster cycle times, fewer delays, earlier intervention, and higher service levels.
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