Case Study • Field Operations

The rain hit Nashville on schedule. The $38k loss didn't.

Client: PavingX
Industry: Paving / Heavy Civil Construction
Service: AI Solutions|Data Analytics

Overview

A field report on OpsAI, the operations command center Sphere built for PavingX — a national pavement management and paving contractor — narrated across one representative day across a 40+-branch, 300+-crew network: routing, weather-driven replanning, work-order intake, and the AP pipeline unifying four newly merged back-office systems into one.

The Situation

It's a weekday morning inside OpsAI, the command center running PavingX's 40+-branch network. Crews are on the books across the network; 91.8% are dispatched today, working toward roughly 10,400 jobs this year for accounts like WarehouseCo, PharmacyCo, HomeCo, AutoCo, and HardwareCo. Five schedule conflicts are already flagged this morning, average dispatch lead time sits at 14 hours, and the desk is already watching weather, routing, and an in-flight AP migration across four newly acquired companies — all before the first crew hits a jobsite.

Rain forecast hits a sealcoat schedule

Crews stand down for the day, or get shifted last-minute by phone calls.

A work order arrives from a national account

Manually triaged and routed — avg 47 minutes, sometimes to the wrong branch.

Four merged companies, four AP systems

$412k across 68 invoices stuck in translation between Sage, QuickBooks, Foundation, and Viewpoint.

Our Solution

OpsAI watches every branch simultaneously — weather thresholds, crew capacity, work-order routing, and AP matching — and acts before a dispatcher has to notice.

1. Weather-Driven Replanning
Nashville's forecast just crossed a threshold: rain tomorrow morning through afternoon, and sealcoat needs temperatures above 50°F and rising with a clean 24-hour window on both sides — crackseal tolerates rain far better. Left alone, that forecast would strand 6 scheduled sealcoat crews, including jobs for TravelCo and a PharmacyCo location. The desk doesn't wait for a dispatcher to notice: at 94% confidence, it reroutes those 6 crews to 4 already-queued crackseal jobs instead, recovering an estimated $38,000 in crew utilization that would otherwise have been lost standing crews down for a day.
2. Invoice & AP Automation
In the back office, a different kind of weather is being worked through: PavingX's 2024 merger with Meridian Paving, plus the acquisitions of Crestline Paving, Keystone Paving, and Unigrade, brought four different accounting systems into one company — Sage, QuickBooks, Foundation, and Viewpoint. $412k across 68 invoices sits unmatched across them. The desk's biggest single recommendation today: run a mapping template against Crestline Paving's 22 Sage-export invoices, clearing an estimated $146k of that backlog in one pass instead of a controller reconciling each one by hand.

Why This Matters to PavingX's P&L

Weather stops being a coin flip

Thresholds are monitored per branch, per job type, continuously; crews get rerouted to work they can still do, instead of standing down or risking a failed application.

A merger's back office gets one pipeline instead of four

Sage, QuickBooks, Foundation, and Viewpoint reconcile into a single AP process, clearing $412k of legacy backlog with one systematic pass rather than four separate reconciliations.

National accounts get routed right the first time

96% of work orders — from WarehouseCo, PharmacyCo, AutoCo and others — reach the correct branch and crew type without a human triage step.

Crews go where the headroom is, not just where the schedule says

When a 31-year foreman's pre-retirement schedule leaves Indianapolis short-staffed, the desk flags the reallocation as soon as the gap opens, before utilization visibly drops.

Field performance is visible branch by branch

Denver's 96% utilization and Indianapolis's 71% are both visible in the same view, so the gap gets a plan, not just a quarterly conversation.

Results

Across the network today, that's the pattern repeating at every branch: a schedule conflict resolved before it becomes a missed job, a work order routed before someone has to call and ask which branch it belongs to, an invoice matched before it ages another billing cycle. Rolled up over 12 months, the same desk is modeled to save 18,200 drive-hours a year from routing optimization, avoid $2.1M in weather-reschedule cost, cut AP processing time 71%, and lift on-time job completion 9 points to its current 94% — across a network that, a year ago, was four separate companies running four separate playbooks.

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Hear from

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Hear from our clients

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors

Our experience with Sphere and their team has been and continues to be fantastic. We keep throwing new projects at them, and they keep knocking them out of the park (including the rescue of a project that was previously bungled by another vendor).

Ben Crawford

Senior Product Manager at Enova Financial

I would expect to be delighted. It's been a really positive experience, working with Sphere, and I would expect you to have the same.

Mark Friedgan

CEO at CreditNinja

Sphere consistently prioritizes the needs of their clients, demonstrating both agility and teamwork. As an offshore team, they have been an integral part of our organization and we plan to continue growing with them.

René Pfitzner

Co-Founder at Experify

Sphere provided excellent full-stack development manpower to augment our team and help push our product forward. They are easy to work with, tech-savvy and proactive.

Bruce Burdick

Chief Information Officer at Integra Credit

We've been working with Sphere and its excellent consultants since our founding. I've found that they are true partners in the success of our business.

Jemal Swoboda

CEO at Dabble

The resources and developers that Sphere Software provides are skilled and have the required technical expertise, but more importantly, they have helped us build a culture of excellence within our team.

Arthur Tretyak

Founder and CEO at IntegraCredit

With Sphere, we were able to migrate in half the time it would take to train an additional FTE… and for a fraction of the cost. Our experience with Sphere has been exceptional.

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors