With offices in Madison, Wis., a growing staff and nine modules of software for heavy, highway and civil contractors, IVO Systems is positioning itself as an alternative to incumbent construction software suites in the space.
In August, IVO Systems and TitletownTech, a venture capital firm anchored by the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft, announced a successful $1.5 million seed round led by TitletownTech with additional investment from customers including Oklahoma-based Woods Dirt and Ohio-based Eramo & Sons. Funds will be used to make product enhancements and hire for roles in marketing, sales, and software development.
TitletownTech invests in early stage, high-growth companies, and has also backed Kentucky-based Configure, a marketplace to help designers and contractors purchase engineered-to-order and technical products through a digitized supply chain with local suppliers. Titletown Tech makes investments of between $200,000 and $2 million, either as a leader or co-investor. They favor founders in Wisconsin or the Midwest and have construction and manufacturing as a target sector.
Modern, Mobile Heavy Construction Software
In a September briefing with IRONPROS, IVO Co-Founder Eric Christensen said the company was small but hiring, with sales and customer success calls both currently being fielded by the founders themselves.
“With this funding, we have three go-to-market strategies,” Christensen said. “Number one is creating our internal salesforce; number two is creating an external sales rep network. And number three is channel partnerships getting into sales marketplaces and integrations with all the construction enterprise resource planning (ERP) products like Sage, Foundation, Acumatica and Viewpoint.”
Christensen said the Procore marketplace may be on the list for IVO Systems to join, but “they're probably a little bit more competitive in our space, and we'll probably go to them later than some of these other ones with less competing products.”
Christensen and co-founder Bob Lien worked together at R.G. Huston Company, a Wisconsin-based civil contractor where Lien laid the groundwork for the equipment management component and other concepts underpinning IVO Systems' current product line. Lien used the online magnet board to pull in data from Caterpillar, John Deere, Volvo and other telematics systems and to manage operators, fuel usage, idle time and more.
“We used the HCSS products while we were there, all of them,” Christensen said. “My co-founder worked in the shop with the mechanics, using Equipment360. I worked in office, where we had heavy job for dispatch. We built what we wished we had. We've been described—and this is an easy explanation but not 100% right—as like HCSS lite. We're a modern platform that's mobile-friendly with the core essentials heavy contractors need.”
IVO Systems currently offers nine modules including:
TrackVO equipment and project tracking
DispatchVO dispatch ticket management and scheduling
TelematicsVO, a GPS and telematics integration platform
RentalVO for equipment rental tracking
MaintainVO for automated preventative maintenance and work orders
EQInspectVO equipment inspection forms
ScheduleVO for employee project scheduling and notifications
FieldVO, a field reporting dashboard
UtilityLocateVO, a tool for utility location and documentation
The list of modules is set to expand into more construction processes with:
TimeVO for auto-populated employee timecards
FuelVO fuel and fluid tracking
CredentialVO for employee licensing, certification and training management
SafetyVO safety inspection forms
PlannerVO for long-term employee and equipment tracking
The current customer list is naturally heavy with Wisconsin contractors, but IVO Systems has customers from coast to coast and as far afield as Australia.
IVO Systems Secret Sauce
While IVO Systems may be characterized as a lighter, simpler version of established products, simplicity is often achieved through hard work and in some cases, by using technology to obscure, manage or eliminate complexity.
“A big part of our secret sauce has to do with our ScheduleVO,” Christensen said. “With ScheduleVO, we send text message scheduling notifications to field employees. And then from there, they can track equipment, aggregate telematics, data, work orders, equipment, inspection forms and upload photos.”
What this functionality does is really eliminate the need to roll out the application deliberately to employees, who get added into and signed into the web interface automatically by clicking on a link in the text. A next round of functionality will extend this even further, however.
“We're going to be coming out with timecards that go along with our text message notifications,” Christensen said. “The timecards already pre-populated, and we're just now adding the ability to fill out timecards. We're also building out a resource planner as well for quick long-term equipment scheduling and crew planning that takes into consideration safety credentials.”
The IVO Systems modules are designed for self-performing contractors rather than generals, and heavy and civil contractors in particular will appreciate the hardware-agnostic nature of the equipment management modules.
“That's a big thing for heavy civil that they like about us,” Christensen said. “We aggregate telematics from all OEM and third-party hardware. We don't sell GPS trackers or telematics hardware. We just aggregate telematics data. We don't care where we get the data from.”
IVO Systems is adding extensive value to telematics data it grabs from equipment, delivering basic a basic computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) for the equipment shop.
“It’s not just CMMS though,” Christensen said. “We handle equipment moves, dispatching, crew scheduling, all that other stuff. It’s all their operations in one, especially once we get timecards in there.”
The software was launched on Amazon Web Services, but thanks to Microsoft Azure credits courtesy of Titletown Tech and Microsoft, the software is migrating over to that cloud platform. The IVO Systems product is built primarily in Java using the React library. React will be used to develop a mobile app—the product is currently exclusively on a web interface.
IVO Systems Pricing and Market
Current and planned IVO Systems modules are a fit for self-performing heavy, highway and civil contractors including bridge builders, earthworks contractors, underground utilities contractors and trenchless companies, but some other trades including plumbing and fire protection are coming into the fold.
“We're expanding out to other specialty trade self-performing contractors,” Christensen said. “These are not service contractors, but project-based contractors. We won’t pursue the contractors doing installs and repairs or field service.”
Contractors with a out 25 employees will start to experience the complexity that will make IVO Systems attractive, and Christensen said they are serving and can serve contractors with up to a billion dollars in revenue.
Company size is one metric used to calculate the subscription price, along with the size of the heavy equipment fleet, percentage of the fleet with telematics, number of field employees and the number of modules. Fleet size calculations can include wiggle room for different equipment classes.
“When it comes to how many pieces of heavy equipment you have, we define that as something you want to keep a preventative maintenance schedule on,” Christensen said. “If you're going to change the oil on it, do a yearly inspection, that's heavy equipment. But we’ve got a contractor with 10,000 pieces of barrier wall in our system. We just we let people manage that and don't really charge for it right now, because it just works.
This puts a smaller contractor with 25 employees at a price point of a couple thousand dollars a year, according to Christensen while the largest customers may pay 50 times more.
BOTTOM LINE: There are a number of mature software solutions for heavy construction operations on the market, and some modern ones born in the cloud. IVO Systems has the benefit of strong financial backing, principals with deep roots in the industry, a visually intuitive interface and a hardware-agnostic approach to equipment technology. While some of their offerings are simpler but less robust than competitors, their approach to scheduling and magnet board drag-and-drop interface may make them attractive to contractors who yearn for simplicity. Other modules, a mobile interface and integrations to other software products will be important moves, but IVO Systems seems to have achieved a solid market-product fit.
