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Industrial construction · in progress

A system of their own, instead of one that costs millions

An industrial construction company in northwestern Mexico ran on a purchased construction management software, expensive and complicated, and on dozens of spreadsheets traveling back and forth by email. Instead of replacing it with another off the shelf system, we are building them their own, in phases, and each phase goes into operation before the next one starts.

The goal

That the information from every job gets entered once, where it originates, and flows on its own from there all the way to payment. Their director of operations put it this way: “that there is no room for human error: I didn’t see the email, I didn’t enter this, I entered it wrong.”

How it worked before

• More than ten years of budgets lived in loose Excel files, with a different format for each client. Looking one up meant finding it, opening it and comparing by hand, and versions got overwritten.
• The construction software they already paid for had the features; its problem was how complicated it was. Field staff handed the work off to the office, and vendors avoided its portal.
• A progress estimate, the monthly billing for work completed, was entered three times: from the system into a spreadsheet and back again.
• The weekly payment schedule was another Excel file traveling by email. Whatever went unpaid was copied by hand into the following week, and proofs of payment were uploaded one by one. Months could pass between an estimate coming in and getting paid.

What we did

We started with what hurt the most and grew from there, with their people validating every piece before signing off on it:

• November 2025 to February 2026: an assistant that answers questions about their historical budgets in plain language, from the email or chat they already used, and builds the Excel file with the answer.
• March to June 2026: approved payments are read straight from the emails and assemble the weekly schedule on their own; electronic invoices are checked against the payment; and a dashboard with chat and voice to look all of it up.
• July 2026: one click on any payment opens the email and the document it came from. The idea came from their Administration department.
• August to October 2026: the vendor registry with its portal and document file, jobs, purchasing, contracts, purchase orders, digital progress estimates, job expenses, labor, change orders and surety bonds. Progress estimates went into production one week ahead of the agreed date.
• November 2026: phase closeout, with twenty acceptance criteria met and a manual for every role that uses the system.

What comes next is planned for 2027: budgets calculated from the real costs of earlier jobs, schematic designs, and the balance of each project.

The path of a progress estimate

This is what one of the processes now running in the system looks like: a subcontractor’s progress estimate, from the moment it is entered until it is paid. Six people take part. The system carries it from one to the next, sends it back to whoever needs to correct it, and lets each person know by email when it is their turn.

The impact, measured with CREO

I measure the impact of every project with four questions, which I call CREO: did the company become more Competitive? Did it improve its Return, meaning its profitability? Is it more Efficient? Does it meet its Obligations better, the tax, legal and contractual ones? Not every project hits all four, and here are the ones that apply.

Competitiveness

They have a system tailored to the way they work, one the competition cannot buy ready made. Subcontractors enter their own progress estimates in the portal, instead of sending them in for someone to type up.

Efficiency

Double entry is gone. The payment request is generated on its own from the approved estimate, whatever went unpaid rolls over to the next week on its own, and each bank receipt is matched to its payment on its own. Reviewing the week’s payments on a phone went from twenty-one screens to fewer than four.

Obligations

Each vendor’s file checks its expiration dates every day, such as Mexican Social Security filings and the tax status certificate, and warns if someone with expired paperwork is about to be paid, which is what Mexico’s registry of specialized service contractors requires. An invoice whose amount or VAT does not match is rejected, the bank receipt prevents paying the same thing twice, and every signature is recorded with date, time and name.

Return

It comes indirectly, from what stops being lost to errors, duplicate payments and data entry time. It is still early to put a number on it, and we would rather measure those savings with real operation than estimate them.

The result

• More than ten years of budgets are now structured and searchable in seconds.
• Their Project Controls department redid a real progress estimate with a calculator, and the system matched their own spreadsheet to the cent. A real invoice also matched to the cent.
• A robot walks through the whole process the way a person would, from estimate to payment, and we have run it hundreds of times without a single failure.
• The adjustments their people asked for in a validation session were in production that same night.
• At phase closeout, everything is delivered and validated, and what comes next is running their daily operation on it. In the words of their director of operations: “practice is what we need to get going.”

More with less

Vendor registry, purchasing, contracts, progress estimates and payments went into production in about three months, without the company hiring a single additional person and without annual licenses that grow with every user. Buying one of the big systems costs millions and a year of work just for the base version; this one is theirs from day one.