Pavecon Realizes New Levels of Efficiency with Digital Transition

About Pavecon

For about three decades, Pavecon has been delivering top-of-the-line asphalt and concrete services. Today, Pavecon is an industry leader, operating 4 companies and 9 divisions, serving multiple states throughout the U.S. with services including concrete paving, asphalt paving, concrete and asphalt repair, and full preventative pavement maintenance.

The Challenge

When it comes to embracing technology, the construction industry often finds itself lagging behind many other markets. Physical paperwork and Excel spreadsheets dominate the back office landscape while foremen handpick crews and struggle to manually fill out required forms from memory. Pavecon’s process was no exception.

Although Pavecon achieved astounding growth, they were still relying on pen, paper, and memory to run the business. The accounting department manually scanned thousands of timesheets for payroll, thousands of jobs were scheduled on magnetic whiteboards, and information was printed, stapled, and hand-keyed into separate systems.

“Our clients are evolving, but the construction industry is not evolving as quickly,” said Daniel Kilman, President of Pavecon. “The foremen were scheduling crew members, ordering the concrete or asphalt, and reserving equipment all in manual, pen-and-paper format. Pavecon needed to improve the process and create a solid platform to evolve the company into the next business phase.”

The Solution

To improve data gathering from on-site locations through back-office processing, Pavecon turned to Sparkhound to optimize workflows through a complete digital transformation.

According to Kilman, Sparkhound focused on how the new digital programs would function within the Pavecon environment. “You can have the best processing program in the world, but it may not work for us,” Kilman said.
“We need to stay completely focused on what serves the ultimate need of our Pavecon economy as well as serving the needs of our employees. Sparkhound took this seriously.”

To lay the foundation for Pavecon’s digital journey, Sparkhound selected a Microsoft-supported environment including Office 365, SharePoint, Azure SQL Database, Active Directory, Power BI for business analytics, and PowerApps to create mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms.

Once the Microsoft foundation was in place, Sparkhound systematically rolled out new digital services supported by mobile devices and smartphones. These services include:

1. Integrity Payroll System: A one-touch approach that removes 13 additional payroll steps per employee. Now, with a single click, the entire process is completed.
2. The A-Level Program: Automates job-rating. Previously, leadership, production, and sales filled out paper surveys to rate performance across 5,000 jobs per year, generating 15,000–20,000 pages of data. This is now fully digital.
3. The CVC (Customer Value Creation) Scheduling System: A digital scheduling and logistics tool that captures employee impact on customer satisfaction. Mobile input simplifies field data collection, giving Pavecon real-time feedback across multiple states.

Simple user interfaces—such as sliders and wheels—make it easy for workers to engage with the new systems, reducing processes that once took weeks down to just hours.

Benefits

The previous paper trail of handing forms to foremen and hoping for their return has been eliminated. Now, employees use apps on smart devices to rate equipment or confirm their attendance at a morning huddle. All information is instantly uploaded to the cloud/database, offering what Kilman calls a “bird’s-eye view of the company.”

The digital transformation also enabled Pavecon to:

1. Strengthen its community by capturing data that shows each employee’s value to the company and team.
2. Analyze multiple data sources to uncover new business opportunities.
3. Stay at the forefront of the construction industry by continuing its digital evolution.

“Sparkhound has provided us with a solid platform that prepares Pavecon for future growth,” said Kilman. “Whether it’s a new division, a brick-and-mortar location, or capturing more market share, we now have the best systems in place to help us do it.”