Customer Profile: Thelen Sand & Gravel, Inc.

Thelen Sand & Gravel, Inc.
Founded:	1947
Location:	Antioch, IL
Company Size:	$20-30 Million (Underground & Excavating Div.)
Number of Jobs Bid Annually:	500
Type of Work:	Underground, Excavating

In 1947, Vern Thelen finally had enough money to buy a truck and 25 acres of land from the profit he made selling sand out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon. Today, Thelen Sand & Gravel, Inc. in Antioch, Illinois has over 250 employees and spans several counties and businesses across the midwest. How did this company become one of Lake County’s most enterprising and successful family-owned and operated businesses? By cherishing community, working hard, displaying loyalty, and most importantly, planning for the future. By making innovation a core value of the company, Thelen has been able to successfully integrate cutting-edge technology with time-honored tradition.

But this expansion from a “one-man show” to a complex organization did not come without some growing pains. Many divisions spawned from the sale of aggregate materials, including the Underground and Excavating Division.  With the work volumes piling up the Excavating Division had to upgrade its technology, and HeavyBid was the route they took.  Tim Clutter, Contract Administrator at Thelen Sand & Gravel said, “Realizing that workloads were already high, we invested in HeavyBid estimating software, which allowed our workers to become more efficient.  This software helped increased the amount of bids we were able to turn out, which in turn increased the amount of work our division did.”

With the quick expansion of Thelen, a problem that they ran into was the delay of available job information between multiple departments. Thelen relied on accounting reports to monitor job progress, but discrepancies between old accounting records and time cards took weeks to trace. The company spent tremendous resources tracking down daily details, analyzing handwritten time cards, and seeking clarification on details of old jobs by busy work crews. Thelen recognized that these time consuming investigations as well as possible delays in job progress could be resolved quicker, so they looked for technological solutions.

“To complement our bidding software, our company bought HeavyJob field management software,” Clutter said. “HeavyJob has proven to be the solution.  It not only records daily jobsite information such as labor and equipment hours, progress quantities, and major material receipt/usage, but it also allows seamless integration of time card data with the company’s COINS accounting system. With HeavyJob, discrepancies between field crew entries and accounting records can now be quickly traced to files on the company server instead of handwritten tickets buried in a folder.”

By installing HeavyJob on a Citrix server, Thelen has taken this integration even further by enabling home office information to be remotely accessible by field superintendents and foremen. With an internet enabled laptop in a pickup, foremen can now e-mail time cards to the office as well as directly access office data to analyze job production. Errors are resolved quicker, numbers going from the field to accounting line up cleaner, and crews remain busy working rather than explaining old details.

“This job tracking software is amazing. Not only can we track all of our labor and equipment hours against our budget, but the production analysis screen is on the cutting edge of technology. It has allowed our foremen to check numbers against the budget on a daily basis and also for the week, month, or even the entire job. This lets them know immediately if they need to pick up the pace, or if they are on top of their job. Most companies, including ours a few years ago, would not find this information out until weeks into the project and possibly not even until the job was over,” Clutter said.

In the summer of 2004 Thelen implemented another HCSS software program called The Dispatcher. “We now know where every piece of equipment and every person are on a daily basis. With the most recent update, we are able to link up HeavyJob and The Dispatcher to ensure that the foremen are entering on the time card the specific piece of equipment that was scheduled for them. It seems that with every update, HCSS is improving the system in a useful and practical manner,” Clutter concluded.

Thelen’s embracement of new technology to support expanding operations is not only a testament to their motto, “Small enough to know our customers and large enough to take care of their needs,” but also a vow to stay ahead of the competition.