Ask a construction CFO about margin and you’ll get a tired nod. Margins are thin, everyone knows it, and most shops are already squeezing them as hard as they safely can. The more useful conversation is about cash.
In a recent webinar on engineer-to-order work, Tim Ryan, an ERP sales executive at WIA Systems, an IFS Platinum Partner specializing in construction, put a number on the table that’s worth sitting with. The average construction company in the US operates on roughly 17 days of cash.
Hold that against how long it takes a lot of shops to turn a finished design into an accurate, costed bill of materials inside their ERP. If that takes two weeks, you’ve spent most of your cash runway before you even know what the job will cost you. A slow BOM costs you liquidity, which in this business is the number that actually hurts.
Why construction runs on cash, not just margin
A product manufacturer can absorb a little slack in timing by building to stock and holding inventory to smooth the bumps. A project-based construction or fabrication shop doesn’t have that cushion. Every job is its own project, site conditions move daily, and approvals stack up at several levels before anyone can commit a dollar.
Tim said it plainly: in construction, everything touches everything. Labor, materials, and schedule are all linked, so a single piece of late information doesn’t stay where it started. It works its way through the whole operation. (Tim went deeper on the unique pressures of construction tech in his episode of the Integrate Intelligently podcast, worth a listen for the full picture.)
You can trace the chain. Engineering finishes a design, but the BOM doesn’t reach IFS cleanly for two weeks. Procurement can’t release the long-lead purchase orders without confirmed parts. The field can’t break ground on that scope because the material isn’t on order. When the field slips, the back office feels it too, since schedule, budget, and billing all move together. The clock on those 17 days never stops while this plays out.
None of that is an IFS problem. IFS is built for exactly this. It supports multiple bill-of-material types, ties a shop order to a project, ties a service work order to that same project, and keeps the audit trail back to every change. The platform is ready to plan, cost, and schedule the moment it has accurate data. The gap sits upstream, in how that data travels from CAD into the system.
The ERP plans confidently on whatever you give it
A late BOM is more dangerous than it looks, and the reason is that an ERP doesn’t hesitate. Feed it a bill of materials and it will plan, cost, and schedule around that information right away, with total confidence.
So if the data is two weeks stale, or carries a transcription slip from a manual handoff, the system does precisely what it was built to do and plans around the wrong numbers, fast and at scale. That’s a point in the platform’s favor rather than a knock against it. IFS is doing its job well. The real question is whether the data feeding it is good enough to deserve that level of execution. In a lot of shops the honest answer is “not yet,” because the handoff between engineering and the ERP is still a person re-keying parts, product structures, and routings by hand.
The billing angle nobody puts in the ROI deck
Dylan Olson, a solutions architect at CADTALK who spent over a decade as a manufacturing engineer before this, added the piece finance teams feel hardest.
When you build something to install at a customer site, billing often hangs on completion milestones. Project-completion billing, progress billing. The structures vary, but the pattern holds. You can’t bill for work the system doesn’t know happened yet. So the sooner your material and production data is accurate in IFS, the sooner you can bill, and the sooner you collect.
Run that back through the 17-day window. Faster, cleaner data protects the cash you have. It also pulls forward the cash you’re owed. For a business living on two and a half weeks of runway, both directions count.
What “fast” actually takes
The instinct, when the data is slow, is to throw a person at it. Add a data-entry specialist who understands how parts get set up in IFS, how they behave when MRP runs, how routings and procurement fields need to be configured. That works, right up until that person is on vacation or moves on. Then the speed you bought walks out the door with them.
The durable version takes the handoff off people entirely. CADTALK reads the BOM data straight from the CAD or PDM environment, transforms it according to your business rules, and writes it into IFS, with no manual re-entry in the middle. The rules apply the same way on every release and every engineering change, so the data lands consistent and quick whether it’s a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon.
In a live production environment, CADTALK has taken an order to the shop floor in about two minutes. That’s the real thing, not a demo running on perfect data.
For a construction shop, the payoff is concrete. Parts get confirmed early enough to release long-lead POs on time. The field schedule holds because the material is actually moving. Billing fires when the work is done instead of two weeks later. And when the job shifts under your feet, which in construction it always does, the decisions get made on current numbers.
Sizing your own exposure
You don’t need a formal study to know where you stand, just a few honest answers.
Start with speed. How long does it take a finished design to become an accurate, costed BOM inside IFS? If that runs in days or weeks rather than hours, the lag is sitting directly on top of your cash window. Then look at concentration. If only one or two people can actually do that handoff, a cash-critical process now depends on those individuals being at their desks, and their vacation becomes your schedule risk.
Errors are the third thing to count. Add up the wrong-part orders and rework cycles from the last quarter where a bad BOM slipped through to procurement or the field. Each one has a real number attached, and they accumulate faster than the cost of fixing the cause. Finally, think about change. Designs change mid-job, and when one does, how fast does the new version reach costing, purchasing, the field schedule, and billing? If it takes a week to propagate, you’re approving decisions on a stale picture during the exact window when conditions move fastest.
Notice that most of those are cash questions wearing an engineering costume.
Putting a number on it
Finance teams are right to be wary of efficiency claims that never reach the ledger. So treat this as math.
Start with engineering time. Industry research from Tech-Clarity puts the share of engineering capacity lost to non-value-added tasks at around a third, and BOM re-entry sits squarely in that bucket. Take a fully loaded engineer’s salary, apply that percentage, and you have a hard, recoverable cost on the table right now. For a 10-engineer team, that math lands near $234,000 a year. You can run the numbers for your own shop with CADTALK’s ROI calculator.
Then layer in the part the spreadsheet usually misses, which is the cost of one bad BOM reaching the field. A wrong part gets ordered, a crew stands around waiting on material, and a rework cycle throws off both the schedule and the billing behind it. A single one of those can cost more than a full year of integration licensing.
That’s why the payback typically shows up in two to four months on engineering hours alone. The downstream-error savings and the faster billing come on top, and in a cash-tight construction business they may matter more than the hours do.
The decision isn’t technical
It’s tempting to file CAD-to-ERP integration under IT, a project for after go-live, once things settle. In a business running on 17 days of cash, that filing turns out to be the expensive choice, because every month the handoff stays manual is another month your IFS investment plans and bills on data that arrived late.
If you already run IFS, you’ve made the big move, and it was a good one. The shops pulling ahead aren’t shopping for a different platform. They’re making sure the capable one they own gets fed clean, timely data, fast enough to matter to their cash. On a 17-day runway, that speed is the whole game.
Want to see where your CAD-to-IFS handoff is costing time and cash? Watch it run at cadtalk.com/demo, or reach the team at sales@cadtalk.com.
