Over 18 months and three connected engagements, a fast-growing electrical and mechanical contracting group replaced a patchwork of disconnected field operations, HR, and finance systems with a single, real-time data backbone — freeing an estimated 450+ staff-hours a week in IT and HR alone, and giving a company scaling by acquisition the system architecture to keep growing without growing its back office at the same rate.
About the Client
The client is a multi-brand electrical and mechanical contracting group serving mission-critical facilities, including data center infrastructure, across the United States. Built through a steady pace of acquisitions, the organization operates several regional field-service companies under one holding structure, each running its own crews, projects, and purchasing, all rolling up to a shared ERP and finance function.
That growth model is a strength in the market and a strain on systems: every acquisition brought its own tools, habits, and data, and the group’s IT, HR, and finance teams were absorbing that complexity largely by hand.
The Challenge
The group runs on a shared ERP system (IFS) for finance, projects, procurement, and billing but the day-to-day work of running field service happened somewhere else entirely.
Field technicians log time, parts, purchase orders, and invoices in separate operations platforms (a utility work management system called UnitsPro, and a cloud-based field-service management platform, BuildOps), and each system is rolled out across the group’s operating brands as independent tenants. Historically, neither system talked with the ERP system, which meant every job, timesheet, purchase order, receipt, and invoice had to be manually re-entered, reconciled, or chased down between systems. This meant thousands of records a week were manually entered, multiplied across several operating companies, each with its own instance of the field platform.
The same challenge happened in HR. New hires, rehires, and terminations in the company’s HR and payroll system (ADP) didn’t automatically translate into IT access: a new technician’s Active Directory account, email, Microsoft 365 license, and ERP login all had to be manually provisioned by IT after HR had already done its part, and manually deprovisioned when someone left. For a company of roughly 1,000 employees that regularly hires and integrates new crews through acquisitions, that gap was a recurring source of delay, risk, frustration and rework.
Both BuildOps and IFS are technically demanding platforms, with complex configurations, workflows and data models. Closing the gaps meant going beyond standard integrations: in some cases, it meant redefining how work was done at the client; in others, it meant redesigning how the platforms were configured so they could support preferred workflows. And in some cases, it meant working directly with the software vendors to implement new functionality.
The Solution
Starting with the first of three sequential engagements, the Dispatch team designed and built a connected architecture across the client’s field, HR, and finance systems — each phase built on the trust and system knowledge from the one before it.
Phase 1: UnitsPro ↔ IFS
The first engagement connected the client’s legacy field-operations platform directly to IFS, building six operational and financial integrations covering job structure and estimates, job progress, customer invoicing, AP invoices, project transactions, and equipment records. This phase eliminated the original round of duplicate data entry between field crews and finance, and gave Dispatch deep working knowledge of the client’s ERP configuration — knowledge that carried directly into the next two phases.
Phase 2: HR Automation
The second engagement automated the client’s full employee lifecycle across four systems: ADP Recruiting Management, ADP Workforce Now, Microsoft Active Directory, and IFS. New hires and rehires now automatically generate Active Directory accounts, login credentials, group and org-unit assignments, Microsoft 365 licenses, and IFS user accounts — with notifications routed to the Service Desk, HR team, and hiring manager. Terminations automatically deactivate access across every connected system. Employee updates, location and job title changes, and manager changes now flow through automatically rather than via manual cross-team communication.
Phase 3: BuildOps ↔ IFS
The third and largest engagement supported the client’s implementation of BuildOps, a modern field-service platform, deployed as three separate tenants (one per operating brand), all of which needed to stay in sync with the shared IFS instance. This was not a standard system-to-system integration: BuildOps and IFS were never designed to be this tightly connected, and Dispatch’s role went beyond integration to include BuildOps process design and configuration. The team worked side by side with the BuildOps implementation team and every business function at the client, synchronizing three layers of data: foundational client data, operational data, and financial transactions.
The integration runs bidirectionally and largely in near real time, handling high volumes with no manual re-keying: roughly 10,000 timesheets, 1,500 job updates, and 1,200 customer invoices a week, along with thousands of purchase orders and supplier invoices, flow automatically between the field platform and the ERP.
Where BuildOps’ standard APIs couldn’t expose what the ERP needed, such as custom prevailing-wage and compliance fields and document attachments, the team built a dedicated data layer on Snowflake to carry that information across, closing a gap that no off-the-shelf connector could.
Value Delivered
| Area | Result |
|---|---|
| IT capacity | ~100 hours/week freed from manual Active Directory account management |
| HR capacity | ~350 hours/week freed from manual employee record creation and cross-team coordination |
| Onboarding & offboarding | Access provisioning and deprovisioning now happen automatically, same-day, instead of through manual cross-team requests |
| Field-to-finance data entry | Thousands of weekly job, timesheet, purchase order, receipt, and invoice records now flow automatically instead of being re-keyed between systems |
| Data quality | Real-time, bidirectional alignment between HR, field operations, and ERP replaces reconciliation after the fact |
| Scalability | A repeatable integration pattern now exists for onboarding each newly acquired operating company onto the shared systems |
Beyond the numbers, the engagement changed how the client’s teams work day-to-day. HR no longer manually messages IT every time someone joins, moves, or leaves. Field teams and the finance department see the same numbers without a reconciliation step in between. And because the integration pattern has now been proven across three separate operating brands on a single ERP, the client has a template for bringing future acquisitions onto its core systems faster than before.
The partnership continues: following go-live, the client engaged Dispatch for ongoing automation support, and the two teams are now scoping a new round of enhancements to the HR integrations.
Summary
Growth by acquisition is a proven strategy for building scale — but only if the systems underneath can absorb it. This client’s three-phase journey, from UnitsPro to full HR automation to a deeply custom BuildOps–IFS integration across multiple operating brands, shows what it takes to make that strategy sustainable, including deep understanding of business processes, data and systems, and working collaboratively to redesign workflows across multiple systems, functions and brands.
The result is an organization where field work, HR, and finance run on the same real-time data, freeing hundreds of staff-hours a week and giving the company a repeatable path for integrating the next acquisition.
