If your company is too small- with only five pieces of equipment and under 10 employees, you don’t need software to help track and manage your company. You can use software such as Excel or even a legal pad with smaller numbers, but once you get to a certain level and add bigger branches or divisions with more employees and equipment, you are going to need a platform like IVO Systems to help you keep track.
On the contrary, companies that are too large, with international branches and tons of employees, are most likely going to be too big for our software. We may be able to service certain branches or pieces of equipment, but a bigger company is probably going to need a more enterprise based software that offers more features.
We are always open to meet with your company and schedule a demo to have a better understanding of your company and your needs to see if your company is a good fit for IVO Systems. You may find that with your specific needs, our modules may be what you need to manage your operations.
Please visit our website and reach out to learn more about our platform.
C.W. Kick is the equipment manager at Midwest Mole, a boring tunneling, directional drilling and railroad services construction company. Midwest Mole completes heavy civil construction projects across the country and C.W. takes care of buying, selling, fixing, storing and transporting their heavy equipment and is in charge of their shop trucking operations and yard. C.W. has over 20 years of experience in the heavy civil construction industry and the heavy equipment market.
Watch the full testimonial here.
Why did you choose IVO Systems’ platform over other software options?
I think the biggest reason is just the simplicity, kinda always have a joke when it comes to some of this technology and stuff. And I like to keep things sometimes caveman simple. And I think that’s the biggest key, this is it’s intuitive and a lot of things are real simple to navigate through, which the easier the process is, the better the results.
What do you like best about the TrackVO and DispatchVO modules?
I like the fact that it’s it’s easy to navigate, it’s easy to get through. Along those same lines, I like the fact that the equipment you can see it all on one page and very quickly, you can schedule [equipment] moves, and it’s very easy to train people how to use and it kind of just falls back to that original original thing that the easier it is to use, the better its gonna work.
What do you like best about the MaintainVO module for equipment maintenance?
Same thing. You know, it’s right there at your fingertips. Guys can access information. We had a long history of Midwest Moles stashing, stashing all sorts of notes on equipment, different places. And we have a bit of a running joke around here that it’s in the P Drive, which is the mythical place where everything goes to be stored. But in seriousness, it’s it’s very nice to be able to pull up a piece of equipment, you know someone in the field, superintendent, anybody in the office, eliminates a lot of questions and phone calls. What is this thing, whats it weigh? Where’s it at? What’s wrong with it? All of these things become a little easier to deal with.
How has the implementation process been?
Super simple. You know, I’ve had the benefit of kind of pregaming, some of it with with Bob and a little bit before we got to it. But it’s really easy. IVOs been really great to work with and made it pretty easy to import equipment. And then then been there to answer questions on the way.
For a company of the right size, IVO Systems is an improvement over Excel or Google Spreadsheets. These tools are often used to manage equipment, preventative maintenance schedules and employee information and they are helpful for keeping track of data. But with these tools, you’re bound to have errors, and tracking history when issues arise can be challenging.
By using IVO Systems and aggregating all of this information- your equipment, your preventative maintenance, employee schedules- it is much easier to figure out where things are and what needs to be done.
IVO Systems allows you to have a historical record that you can go back to and review any actions taken in the past- something that can be a problem trying to figure out on Excel or Google spreadsheets. With IVO, your aggregated information is all in one single platform that is always there for you to review.
If you’d like to learn more about what IVO Systems can do for you, visit our website and schedule a demo with us.
At a minimum, we do one-year contracts with new customers who want to use our software. This is a long-term commitment by both parties, and we want to provide our operational software for your company and give adequate time to use it and understand how it works.
We want partners who understand what it’s going to take to implement the software and are actively trying to use software to improve their operations. Although one year is minimum for us, we’ve had customers that have found that IVO Systems is a good fit for them and vice versa, and have signed contracts up to ten years.
Longer contracts often come with a discount for long-term signing, but as a new company we appreciate those who see value in us.
We are specifically trying to serve the heavy civil market, and if you are a heavy civil company using our features everyday and feel as if you have suggestions that would improve our software, we love having open and honest conversations with our customers. Our goal is to serve you as best as we can, and make your operations as efficient as possible.
We’ve been careful to not add too much to our software- because we want to keep it simple. However, we are definitely looking for partners to help us grow, as we help you grow. We value customers who are mutually beneficial, and as a new company we’d love if you gave us a chance to show you what IVO Systems is all about.
We understand that most companies work with mixed fleets of equipment- with different manufacturer and third party GPS telematics, and other equipment without any ‘GPS tracking’.
At IVO Systems, we created our platform to manage any type of equipment. If you have GPS telematics enabled equipment we aggregate GPS telematics data and present them in an easy-to-review format for your convenience. With this layout, you can easily tackle any issues with equipment or specific units as soon as they arise.
In addition to this capability, our platform allows you to manage equipment manually moving locations and enter hour meters in the platform. Our system allows users of different access levels to view equipment locations and add in hour meters, permitting for the most accurate and up-to-date locations and hour meters for your equipment fleet.
We know how frustrating it can be to not have this information- that’s why we made it a priority for our software to keep accurate locations and hour meters aggregated with the latest information available all in one place.
Watch to learn more about how we compare to HCSS and B2W
Many of our customers already use HCSS products, specifically HeavyBid and HeavyJob. We recommend those products for bidding your work and tracking how your bid is playing out with daily time cards for each bid. Those products are great, and we are not competing in the bidding or detailed time card market.
We see our value in providing services that help you track, dispatch and maintain your equipment. We provide a price for your entire company to have access to the software- for tasks such as scheduling employees, any project notes, and many other features. We focus on improving and tracking your operations in the field, where your profits are generated.
With that access, your company is provided with better and more up-to-date information that will help you make informed decisions and improve productions, profitability and operations from the field or office.
That is the difference between IVO Systems and other platforms like HCSS and B2W- we provide company wide access and only what you need.Â
At IVO Systems, co-founder Bob Lien developed our software in-house, and we built our platform to be as simple as possible. We have a combined 25 years of experience in the heavy civil construction industry, and we’ve had our fair share of software that over-complicates our needs. We know what we want out of our software, and we’ve worked hard to eliminate any unnecessary features in order to streamline our platform and make it as efficient as possible.
If you come across any bugs or issues while using IVO Systems, we make ourselves available to help you and resolve any problems right away. As a new company, our users are the growth of our platform. If you have a need that you think could be addressed in our software, we are always looking for ways to improve and make our customer’s lives easier, and we would love to hear from you.
We are always discussing new ideas and having conversations with our customers, and as an IVO customer, you can help drive our future developments.
We have recently pushed out an update which includes added functionality for schedule notifications and the ability to limit information seen on schedule notifications by employee group. You may have to log out of the system and log back in for all of these changes to be accessible.
Here is a summary of the changes:
Send custom text message notifications to employees assigned to a job for a date
You can now see the notification history for an employee on any date, including schedule notifications and custom notifications:
Revamped schedule notification text message links — employees will now receive a web link to their schedule for a date instead of a PDF. This new page does not require them to login and is specific to them, reflecting any limits you set on their access to information. Please see an example of how they look here: https://link.ivosystems.com/PV0YDl You can quickly change what job information an employee can see by changing the settings for their employee group as seen below:
Personal Notes (specific to an employee) no longer copy automatically when copying a day’s schedule. Instead, there is a checkbox which you can select if you would like to copy each individual note from that date.
Please contact us if you have any questions about these updates or run into any problems.Â
Co-founders Eric Christensen and Bob Lien both used to work in the field and office at a heavy civil company, and were frustrated with the information gap between the two.
There’s a lot of steps taken to ensure you have the right equipment- calling the dispatcher, talking with the foreman and other operators, all to make sure you know where the equipment is located. We didn’t like having to chase down equipment, and we knew there was a better way.
We like to think of our software as an online magnet board. If you have many pieces of equipment you need a software that will set up specific filters to find each piece of equipment, just like a magnet board.
An example we like to use is when you have a main line pipe crew working in a downtown setting with quad axle dump trucks, which is a couple thousand dollar per hour crew. Then, you come across an un-located utility and you need a mini excavator. Using IVO Systems, you can easily filter the mini excavators, find where one is, create a dispatch ticket and get it to the site quickly.
That’s the advantage of having all this information at your fingertips- no matter where you are.
Bob Lien is one of the co-founders of IVO Systems. His background is in the heavy civil construction industry, and he has experience as a web software developer. At his last position, Bob helped manage the heavy equipment fleet and dealt with a lot of software, including leading the implementation of HCSS Equipment360.
Bob was not satisfied with the options that were available for software, due to their high costs and their lack of features that were necessary. He and Eric then partnered to create IVO Systems- a software solution that would fill these gaps.
IVO Systems help customers get a better handle on their equipment and operations, and Bob is pleased with the amount of customers IVO has been able to successfully help so far.
