Engineering & Construction
The job is the unit of account. Most ERP configurations forget that.
Project cost control, multi-entity consolidation, and field-to-office data flow for contractors and EPC firms running dozens of concurrent job sites.
Draft for review — Draft sector positioning. Confirm the compliance frameworks named on this page are ones OneVision genuinely works to before this goes live.
You are probably here because
- Project managers keep their real numbers in spreadsheets because the ERP is a month behind
- Change orders and commitments live in a different system than the cost report
- Consolidating dozens of job-level entities takes weeks and produces a number nobody defends
- Field cost capture is manual, so variance appears after the money is already spent
- A percentage-of-completion or WIP schedule is assembled by hand every period
What makes this sector different
Construction breaks generic ERP configurations in a specific way: the general ledger wants periods and the business runs on jobs. When those two views disagree, project managers stop trusting the system and go back to their own spreadsheets — and the month-end number becomes an argument rather than a fact.
We configure around the job. Cost codes, commitments, change orders, and retention are set up so a project manager sees their own variance in the same system finance closes from, and so consolidated margin does not require a reconciliation exercise every period.
Where we work inside it
- Engineering, procurement & construction
- Commercial construction
- Heavy highway construction
- Architecture, engineering & construction
- General contractors
- Industrial contractors
- Government DOD, DOE and FEMA engineering & construction firms
- Homebuilders & property management
ERP implementation in the EPC sector
As engineering and construction keeps growing, a successful ERP implementation at every level matters more than it used to. Our white paper covers what the right ERP does for workflow and response times, and how to get past the barriers that keep engineering and construction firms from running at full efficiency.
Tell us what you are running and a partner will send it over with a note on what is most relevant to you.
What we actually do here
Job cost architecture
Cost code structures, commitment and change-order handling, and WIP reporting designed so the project view and the ledger view reconcile by construction rather than by effort.
Field-to-office data flow
Getting timesheets, quantities, and equipment usage from the site into the system the same day, without asking a superintendent to become a data-entry clerk.
Multi-entity consolidation
Joint ventures, project-specific entities, and intercompany equipment charges consolidated in EPM so the roll-up is a report rather than a project.
Revenue recognition & WIP
Percentage-of-completion, over- and under-billing, and retention handled in the system so the WIP schedule is produced rather than assembled.
60+
Concurrent job sites on a typical mid-market contractor
3–7 yrs
Contract durations that outlive most ERP implementations
Job × period
The two views that have to agree every single month
What you are measured against
We would rather name the frameworks up front than discover in week six that the configuration cannot satisfy one of them.
ASC 606 / percentage-of-completion
Revenue recognition configured against how your contracts are actually written, including unpriced change orders and claims.
Surety & lender reporting
WIP schedules and backlog reporting your bonding company and lenders can read without a translation layer.
Prevailing wage & certified payroll
Davis-Bacon and state prevailing-wage requirements handled in payroll configuration rather than in a side process.
Draft for review — Every framework above needs confirming against what OneVision can genuinely speak to in a first call. Naming one you cannot is worse than omitting it.
Enabled visions
What enabling a vision has meant in engineering & construction.
Global engineering & construction contractor
7 → 1
ERP platforms consolidated in nine months
Three $1 billion entities had just been acquired, leaving seven ERP systems that had to become one inside nine months to satisfy SOX. Data center and back-office synergies were expected to come with it.
The full recordGlobal engineering & construction firm, US start-up operation
30 days
From blank page to RFP in market
A new US operation needed the right ERP and had no RFI or RFP to select it with. Financials, HR and payroll, billing, projects, job costs, procurement, and subcontract management all had to be covered.
The full recordPlatforms we run in engineering & construction
Services we deliver most here
Questions from this sector
Do we need a construction-specific ERP, or can Oracle be configured for this?
Both work. The question is whether your complexity lives in the job cost model or in manufacturing, procurement, and consolidation around it. We have seen construction-specific products fail because the finance side was an afterthought, and we have seen general-purpose ERP succeed because project costing was designed first. Our IT strategy assessment answers this with your contracts in front of us rather than in the abstract.
Our project managers do not trust the system. Is that a training problem?
Almost never. It is usually a latency problem — the system shows them last month, so they keep their own numbers. Fix the data flow from the field and the trust follows without a training program.
Can you work with our existing project management tooling?
Yes, and usually you should keep it. Scheduling and field tools that superintendents already use are not the problem; the integration between them and the cost model normally is.
Other industries
Industrial Manufacturing & Fabrication
If the shop floor and the ledger disagree, the ledger is wrong.
Oil & Gas
You answer to partners and regulators at the same time, from the same ledger.
Healthcare
Every system that touches PHI has to survive an audit. Including the ERP.
Finance & Banking
The examiner will ask who had access. Have an answer that is already true.
State & Federal Government
Public money needs a trail, not a reconciliation.