July 28, 2021

M Bar C increases sales and employee productivity with BUILDFitters unified platform

Since 1975, M Bar C Construction has been helping Americans shelter themselves from the sun. What began as a carport construction business has steadily expanded over the years. Today, M Bar C is the industry leader in solar and non-solar carports and shade structures, with an annual construction footprint of 3.9 million square feet. Across the western United States, M Bar C is responsible for the construction of solar structures that generate over 350 megawatts of power.
This case study examines the implementation of BUILDFitters for the client. BUILDFitters replaced and supplemented the client’s existing tools with its comprehensive and unified project management functionalities.

With demand for the company’s services increasing by between 30 and 70 percent each year, Erik Krivokopich, Vice President of Business Development at M Bar C, identified a need to modernize. He saw how the company’s manual, homegrown tracking systems and the on-premises Excel spreadsheets used to log day-to-day activities were no longer able to keep pace with the needs of the business. “As we continued to grow, we saw that the lack of a proper system was holding us back,” says Krivokopich. “We needed an end-to-end solution that could help us manage our growing proﬁle of projects, optimize operations, and support sales.”

Due to siloed data, M Bar C leadership also lacked the cross-departmental visibility they needed to make informed big picture decisions. Overtime, individual departments within M Bar C had adopted their own data storage solutions, none of which shared data with each other. To address each of these issues, M Bar C needed a technology partner with deep industry expertise—someone who could evaluate and implement the scalable CRM, BI, and ERP systems capable of consolidating its data into a single, integrated platform. It was also important that this partner understood the nuances of how M Bar C functions as a business.

A trusted partnership

“AlphaBOLD grasped the issues related to the breadth and diversity of our oﬀerings and outlined a process of digital transformation that will continue to support us as our business grows well into the future,” says Megan McReynolds, Vice President of Finance at M Bar C.

Building oﬀ of the good will expressed by McReynolds, AlphaBOLD worked closely with internal M Bar C teams to identify Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the best solution to ﬁt the company’s needs. Dynamics 365 is an application suite that spans many business units across multiple departments and presents a uniﬁed view of company data.

AlphaBOLD paired Dynamics 365 with data insights from Microsoft Power BI, crashing a tailored BUILDFitters solution that enables quick access to information through interactive dashboards populated in real time with data from a single, central database. BUILDFitters is a packaged solution designed to automate end-to-end processes and streamline project management, sales, inventory management, and on-ﬁeld operations for companies in the architectural, construction, and engineering ﬁelds.

Impactful results in the ﬁeld

M Bar C used its BUILDFitters solution to great eﬀect. In its operations department, which had previously struggled to keep its paper-based records current, employees can now use the BUILDFitters Foreman application to accurately employee hours across multiple job sites. Field employees can also view the locations and statuses of deliveries and each of the company’s 500+ pieces of outsourced machinery via live, in-app updates. Subcontractor hours, a statistic vital to the company’s year-to-year ﬁnances, can also be tracked and updated in real-time. Through the BUILDFitters BI module, foremen can also easily track the age of their equipment. The same dashboards that report each of these statistics can also be used to drill down in order to deliver the ﬁne details surrounding any piece of material, equipment, a given employee’s hours, or the status of any project, ensuring that company resources are being properly utilized. Through this new level of visibility, M Bar C has been able to streamline its processes, increasing productivity and universally reducing its project-related costs.

Digitally transformed sales

The BUILDFitters Sales module also leverages Dynamics 365, empowering agents to manage direct and indirect opportunities. By facilitating collaboration with operations personnel, the Sales module allows Sales agents to create quick, accurate estimates regarding the working hours and materials costs of any potential project. When opportunities took promising, agents can quickly generate same-day proposals with a single click. These efficiency gains have translated into fewer lost opportunities and increased wins. And when leadership needs to know what to expect from sales in the future, departmental teams can access previously siloed historical data to deliver more-accurate sales forecasts.

“With AlphaBOLD’s help, we’ve cut our redundant reporting tasks by 30%,” says McReynolds. “We’ve seen significant improvements to our business overall, and we’re thrilled to have AlphaBOLD as our technology partner.”

Envisioning a prosperous future

Growth itself can sometimes act as a double-edged sword, and M Bar C wanted to ensure that leadership
could oversee the individual performance of its nearly 200 employees, many of whom were new to their positions. To modernize operations, AlphaBOLD bridged the BUILDFitters Field Service and Sales modules with its Project Management module, an end-to-end resource management system that delivers detailed insights into employee performance and estimated project completion dates by integrating data from sales and operations. The solution also allows leadership to compare a job’s status against initial sales proposals in order to adjust delivery timeframes or reallocate resources in order to meet deadlines all from their mobile devices.

M Bar C is constantly finding new ways to use digital technologies to grow as a company, and AlphaBOLD will be with them each step of the way. We are proud to say that BUILDFitters serves as a unified platform for business growth, no matter where a company is in its digital transformation journey. It easily integrates with other Microsoft and third-party applications in order to grow, evolve, and transform with a company’s ever-changing needs.

Since its implementation, this solution has helped M Bar C leadership identify operational inefficiencies and improve productivity across every department within the company. Visibility into work site activity and follow-up visits has dramatically increased. Through their dashboards, leadership can now make data-driven big picture decisions and drill down to discover the finer details of their business, whenever the need arises.

“Initially, we were only looking for a project management solution,” says Michael Paterson, Vice President of Operations at M Bar AlphaBOLD helped us take a deeper look at our processes, which helped us understand where we wanted to go. Through this partnership, we’ve significantly improved M BarC as a whole. This is just the beginning for us, and we’re very excited about where we’re going in the future.”