MAC Surfacing

How we helped MAC Surfacing grow fivefold without an in-house digital team
£30mil+
Growth
1-3
Ranked for all services
x10
Business Growth

About the Brand

First established in 2004, family-owned road surfacing company Mac Surfacing began with mostly road tarmacking and domestic roadwork. Today, MAC Surfacing is one of the UK’s largest road planing companies, offering an entire range of services including, paver hire, plant hire, plant maintenance, plant haulage and more.  

After working with MAC Surfacing for over 18 years and currently working with the second generation, we have a long-standing relationship with MAC Surfacing and the successful expansion of their brand and processes. This case study will explore MAC Surfacing’s initial problems, the solutions we implemented, and how these solutions contributed towards £30 million+ growth.  

The Problem

Our analysis discovered several key areas where MAC Surfacing’s processes could be automated and therefore modernised. In the company’s previous processes, any changes made to a job had to be manually updated across all data points, shift allocation was very administratively heavy, and many processes took up much more time than they needed to.  

MAC Surfacing’s brand was also in need or repositioning in order to aid its organic presence. Their website was also in need of a redesign to accurately display their core services. This was especially important as the brand was competing with enterprise-level competition due to the nature of public sector work.

Our Solutions

We focused on organic SEO to get MAC Surfacing ranked nationally for the main key phrases people were using to find the services the brand offered. As the business was continuing to grow, we created a bespoke portal which enabled business automation to ensure MAC Surfacing’s operations were able to keep up with demand.  

More solutions we implemented included an interactive Kanban board which automatically displays each job and what plant and resources were being used for them and when, a smart shift allocation to simplify availability and roles, and a mobile field app that enabled a decrease in cycle time by digitalising information between infield assets and headquartered staff.

Bespoke WordPress Website & Development

Mobile Field App

We designed and developed a Mobile Field App to help bridge the communication between onsite operatives and office-based staff. Capturing job variations and allowing them to be “signed off” live and streamed back into the portal with the support documentation meant instant invoicing, leading to improved cashflow and reduced payment cycle times from months to days.

The app also provides a pre start analysis of all plant to be live streamed to the workshop, allowing maintenance to be planned ahead with better transparency across departments. When a vehicle goes down it is automatically visualised across all departments so that alternatives can be arranged for any effected jobs.

Bespoke Management Portal with Interactive Touchscreen  Kanban Job Board

The digital transformation strategy included improving departmental communication and visualisation. Originally, the business was run on decentralised systems and worksheets. Our vision was to create a single source of truth that enabled the board to take management decisions based on insight and analytics.

The Results

The solutions we implemented for MAC Surfacing helped the business to both drastically improve and expand. It was ranked top 3 for all its services within 8 months of working with us here at Creative Ideaz. Our portal development solved major issues of vehicle availability and allocating which led to huge advancements and increased efficiency across the business.  

After these implementations, MAC Surfacing has grown tenfold and is now one of the leading companies in the national road planing industry. We are proud to say we have helped MAC Surfacing achieve a turnover of £30 million+.

£30mil+
Growth
1-3
Ranked for all services
x10
Growth
Before Creative Ideaz
After Creative Ideaz
Tracking resource utilisation across multiple departmental whiteboards, each change was manually updated
Interactive Kanban board that was compatible with a touch screen allowing digital boards to automatically show which plant is being utilised on which job and when
Administratively heavy shift allocation across resources
Smart shift allocation, where the portal understands availability, skillset and role and will prompt with a list of available team members
Multiple systems disconnected with the sales order processing cycle
Tight integration of the portal into key business critical software and departments, allowing for complete transparency across departments and reduction of errors
Poor cycle time between a job variation happening and accounts being updated to raise updated
Mobile field app that allows variations to be “signed off” live and streamed back into the portal with the support documentation allowing invoice variation cycle time to be reduced from weeks to days
Poor cycle time on defect reporting and maintenance planning
Mobile field app that allows pre-start analysis of all plants to be live-streamed to the workshop, this allows maintenance to be planned ahead with better transparency across departments. When a vehicle goes down it is automatically visualised across all departments so that alternatives can be arranged for any affected jobs

Creative Ideaz has always allowed use to stay ahead of the competition with our online presence and marketing as well as more recently developing our internal portal system. Our internal system allows us to run various areas of the business which off the shelf software has never been an option - as time goes on, we bring on different departments of the business to eventually be fully managed in one piece of software. This is rolling out to our site based staff by way of an app which is making us the "DPD" of the      surfacing world and overall service offering to our customers.

Marc Copson – MAC Surfacing Managing Director

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