Andersen Asphalt Optimizes Efficiency with App Bitumio
BY AsphaltPro Staff
When Caden and Derek Andersen took over Andersen Asphalt, West Haven, Utah, in 2014, the pair of brothers already had more than a decade of experience with asphalt maintenance. “We’ve been helping with the family business since our grandfather started the company in the early 2000s,” Caden said.
Since the pair took over, Andersen Asphalt has grown by an estimated 30 to 50% year over year, primarily through the addition of new services. “For example, we started paving in 2018 and now it’s about 20% of the work we do,” Derek said. “The rest of it is natural growth, little by little, one year at a time.”
Today, Andersen Asphalt is a full-service asphalt paving and maintenance company. “We do crack sealing, seal coating, striping, asphalt repair and patching, mastic, asphalt paving and slurry and micro sealing,” Caden said.
Despite the company’s growth with other specialties, the brothers have remained true to the company’s roots in asphalt maintenance. “[Asphalt maintenance] is about 80% of the work we do,” Derek said. However, the brothers have brought a spirit of innovation even to its bread and butter asphalt maintenance services.
“We’ve developed a unique process for spray-applied surface treatment,” Derek said. For example, the company cleans ahead of surface treatments by pressure washing the existing pavement.
Caden explained: “It’s very common to see sweeper trucks and blowers, even pressure washing by hand, which is effective but not really efficient.” That’s why Andersen Asphalt uses a 2,000-gallon water truck the company outfitted with a high pressure spray bar on the front. “That allows one guy to clean the street spotless all by himself.”
The company is also highly selective with its applicator trucks, opting for those from Rayner Equipment Systems (RES), an Etnyre International Company. “They have a unique fogging system that allows us to wet the surface before we apply, as well as a 14-foot spray bar so we’re able to get quadruple overlap with each tip,” Derek said. “Those trucks also have rate control systems so we can eliminate potential operator error and get precise coverage so we aren’t overshooting or undershooting what’s been specified. That’s very unique to Rayner.”
“With our preparation and application techniques, we’ve been able to see five to 10 years of extra life compared to the two or three years that’s pretty common in the industry,” Caden said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”
Optimize the Back Office
Alongside the company’s innovation in the field, Caden and Derek began to realize a new bottleneck to the continued growth of Andersen Asphalt: organizing data and workflow in the back office.
“These things weren’t an issue when we were a company of three or four employees 10 years ago and it was easy for us to maintain control of everything that was going on,” Caden said. “But as we’ve grown, our need to be more organized, more effectively communicate, and to optimize efficiency has become more important.”
About five years ago, the brothers began searching for a solution in the form of a single tool. “In that time, we’ve started and stopped at least five or six different solutions because none of them was able to do everything we were hoping for,” Derek said. “There are a lot of platforms out there where the functionality looked like it would work for us, but once we got under the hood, the features weren’t as useful as they looked.”
The biggest issue was finding a solution that supported the sheer variety of Andersen Asphalt’s services, that was simple to use, and was available at a reasonable price point for the 20-person company. “We’re in this sweet spot of being a small company that offers a lot of different services,” Derek said.
“It was particularly hard to find a platform that covered slurry sealing, in addition to asphalt paving and maintenance services,” Caden said. “It was possible to make different platforms work, but to have a platform that has [slurry sealing] built into its functionality is fairly unique.”
The brothers were trying to get away from forcing different platforms to work together.
“For years, we had separate mapping software, estimating software, scheduling software, etc. and we’d have to move our work orders and such manually from one software to the next,” Derek said. “We’d be transferring data several times over by the time we’d get to the end of a project.”
They were tired of wasting time on mundane tasks they felt could (and should) be automated. “It seemed no matter what platforms we tried, we couldn’t escape at least some of that manual data entry,” Derek said. “We were aggressively seeking something better.”
That’s when the company discovered Bitumio, Garden City, Utah, at the National Pavement Expo 2023 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bitumio is an estimation software for asphalt paving and maintenance contractors that aims to improve efficiency and accuracy for job estimation, scheduling, customer management, job costing and crew communication.
“When we saw it, we thought it just might have everything we needed,” Caden said. But, they’d thought that for other platforms and been proven wrong. Still, they decided to give it a try. “We implemented it last year,” Derek said. “It’s really eliminated many of those mundane tasks we’ve been dealing with over the past few years.”
In addition to lacking functionality for Andersen Asphalt’s scope of services, many of the other platforms the company had tried also lacked the simplicity of use Caden and Derek sought. “There were some platforms out there that did everything we needed them to do, but were so complex that it took years to really figure out how to use them well,” Derek said. “With Bitumio, we were able to get up and running quickly.”
They were able to learn how to best use the platform from Bitumio’s library of instructional videos and articles or else by contacting Bitumio customer support for direct assistance.
Even without the tutorials and customer service support, Caden said the platform’s simplicity of use sets it apart from the others they’d tried. “It’s pretty easy to hop in there and figure things out as you go because it’s just that simple to use,” he said. “And because it’s simple to use, it’s been simple to train new people how to use it, too.”
“To take full advantage of Bitumio, it’s important to understand your efficiency rates and set up the platform based on those specific rates,” Caden said. The brothers knew their efficiency rates well, but it did take a couple weeks to get everything accurately set up within Bitumio. “That took us a little time, but now that it’s all set up, it runs smoothly and seamlessly.”
Balance Profitability and Competitiveness | Bitumio also helped Andersen Asphalt understand its costs and bid accordingly. “If you don’t understand your costs, your bids aren’t going to be driven by the market,” Derek said. “Bitumio has confirmed that we were already pretty accurate,” Caden said, adding that the data provided by the platform has still helped them make additional adjustments to balance between profitability and competitiveness.
Minimize the Manual
Today, Andersen Asphalt uses Bitumio for customer relationship management; creating, mapping, sending and following up on bids; and communicating job information to crew members.
“We’ve predefined all of our metrics on the back end—coverage rates, material costs, trucking costs, equipment costs, labor—so all of that is automatically calculated when we generate a proposal,” Derek said. “It’s taken a lot of time out of the estimating process.”
Bitumio has also simplified how contracts are processed. “Once a customer e-signs a contract via email, that project automatically goes into our system to be scheduled,” Caden said. “No more manually moving it from one platform to the next.”
In the past, Derek said he relied on the company’s office manager for help using the scheduling software. “The old system was pretty tough to use and she just knew it so much better than me,” he said, “so I tended to stay away from the old system as much as I could. Now, with Bitumio, I feel confident navigating the scheduling on my own.”
Another feature the brothers appreciate is the automated notifications Bitumio sends out as a project moves from one stage to another. “We used to have to notify customers every step of the way,” Caden said. “If I forget to send a bid because things get really busy out in the field, the system reminds me. When a project is scheduled, the system lets the customer know.”
Bitumio also automatically generates work orders that are available to field crews via the Bitumio app, depending on the permissions set for each employee. “It used to be that we’d be getting texts every night with people asking what job they were on the next day, what’s the start time, etc.,” Caden said. The amount of texts wasn’t an issue when the company comprised a handful of employees 10 years ago; now that there are 20 to 25, it had become more of a challenge.
“When we got everyone set up with the Bitumio app, it’s almost like the lightswitch turned off and we stopped getting all those nightly texts because they could just refer to the app,” Derek said.
The app has also made it easier for the field to communicate with the back office. “They can take photos of the job, input job costs, material use, labor and submit that all to us in real time,” Derek said. “And all that information automatically syncs with the desktop version of the software [used in the office].”
Bitumio also pre-calculates travel time from the plant to the job site to automatically calculate trucking time and costs. “That’s a cool feature that removes a small task that nevertheless takes some amount of time,” Caden said.
The Small Things Are the Big Things
While Bitumio has not completely changed the way Andersen Asphalt conducts business, all of the small things it simplifies has added up to major wins for the company. “ It dummy-proofs our estimating and prevents us from underbidding or overbidding,” Caden said. The value of Bitumio, they say, has come in the form of many small wins every single day that add up to big wins for the company.
“Bitumio’s real value to us has been saving time on so many functions of our business,” Derek said. “It’s allowed us to operate more efficiently from A to Z. That’s really how Bitumio has helped us continue to grow.”