How Stake Center Locating went from a two-week manual close to rolling AI-powered forecasts every month

My name is David Kennedy. I'm the Chief Information Officer of Stake Center Locating. We are the second largest utility locating company in the country. We have about 1,500 associates located throughout the lower 48 states.

We do underground utility locating and grow in about 30% a year roughly over the last several years. I was hired in to redo the back office operations and solutions to make it enterprise ready. Everything was very manual.

Budgeting and forecasting completely manual. Closing the books took roughly two weeks. Old legacy access databases kind of held together with bubble gum and duct tape. Hard to do analysis. Hard to do budgeting and forecasting.

I couldn't push it back into the GL. So it was really looking at what tool could help us do that and be more efficient in our close process. That was the underlying problem we were trying to solve. I had looked into one stream before as we were kind of already down that path.

Did the demo. Did some reference calls. So we decided, you know, to take the plunge. And so we started with close consolidation and reporting. Layered in account reconciliation. And then budgeting and forecasting.

So we got all the legacy junk out of the way and kind of had a stable base. We did forecasting from a full top -down level and sometimes bottom-up. But it was done quarterly. It took me weeks to months to do that.

Which is why it was only done quarterly. Well, by the time you get done, your forecast that you just did is wrong. So we now do a full forecast of rolling 12 months every month. And every week, I do a two-week forecast for the next two weeks.

They're running on two different AI models. But that two-week analysis gives me the ability to go into the field and actually adjust my head count where I need to be when I'm going to see volume spikes.

The more accurate I can be, the more profitable I can be. Game changer. Revolutionary.