Compression Cost Tessier’s $60K Per Job. Now They Get Ahead of It and Protect $500K+ a Year.

Tessier's leadership recognized that manpower planning was one of the company's largest operational risks. Their project managers and pre-construction teams were spending significant time comparing proposal-day schedules against current project reality using Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Project — a laborious process that had to be repeated every time a schedule changed. When a GMP project pushed five months to the right because the owner couldn't get within budget, every contractor on the job absorbed that time without warning. The new schedule, compared against the original, was "way outside the estimate." And this wasn't an isolated event.

Schedule compression was hitting 85 to 90 percent of Tessier's larger projects. When a compressed schedule forces a mechanical contractor to add workers — say five extra tradespeople for four to six weeks — the costs cascade fast: additional vehicles, technology, travel, inherent safety risk from trade stacking, and the operational burden of keeping material in front of a larger crew than Tessier's fabrication shop planned for. One over-manning episode could burn $10,000 to $15,000 off the bottom line in two to four weeks. Left unchecked for six weeks, that becomes a $50,000 to $60,000 problem — on a single project. And the damage doesn't stop there.

"The impact on the next job is guys ain't getting to that job on time," said Shawn Kast, Operations Leader at Tessier's. "So now you're starting to risk that schedule. You're most likely working overtime. It's creating more margin fade up front of another job that you're going to have to correct — hopefully you've got the time to correct it. That one situation can impact a few jobs down the line."

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Tessier's implemented RIVET as the backbone of a cultural shift: moving from centralized, reactive labor coordination to a decentralized model where project managers own workforce planning for their jobs.

1. Early Warning Forecasting

RIVET's forecast became Tessier's early warning system for schedule compression. Once the estimating team loads a job at a 90% probability rate and the PM updates the forecast to reflect actual conditions, the system reveals whether the project is tracking to plan — or whether labor demand is stacking up, shifting right, or accelerating beyond what was estimated. Before RIVET, identifying this required a PM or pre-construction team member to manually rebuild schedule comparisons in Excel and Microsoft Project — the same exercise, repeated every time a schedule changed. Now, with RIVET's version history feature, that comparison happens at the click of a button.

2. Decentralized PM Accountability

Rather than funneling all labor decisions through a single general superintendent — creating a bottleneck where "not just one project could potentially suffer, but multiple" — Tessier's pushed forecasting and labor-movement responsibility down to their project managers. PMs with three or four jobs coordinate directly with each other, moving workers and sharing resources. Bill DeNet describes them as "the best CEO you can have" for their projects. RIVET provides the shared visibility that makes this model work.

3. Portfolio-Level Strategic Planning

Leadership uses RIVET's automated portfolio view to see peaks and valleys across the entire company — from the next four weeks to the next three years. This visibility drives decisions beyond individual projects: when to add workers to the field workforce, when to have conversations with pre-construction about filling gaps, and which projects to pursue based on where profitable work aligns with available capacity. It has made Tessier's "more selective in our projects because we know we have profitable work sitting out there."

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This transformation didn't happen overnight. Tessier's leaders acknowledge that getting to this level of discipline took five to six years of consistent effort. The cultural shift — making PMs responsible for labor forecasting and movements, not just project budgets and schedules — required buy-in from leadership at every level: President Rashid Kadir, Vice President Bill DeNet, and the CFO all championed the initiative. "It's a constant message to everybody. It's not just coming from one spot," DeNet explained. Some PMs learned the value through experience — running into margin fade on their own jobs — while younger team members learned from those who had already felt the consequences. Tessier's also noted that the broader construction technology landscape sometimes feels like it's gone backwards: their new ERP system requires more administrative time from operational teams, pulling PMs away from the field. This makes RIVET's focus on simplicity especially important — keeping the platform "simplistic" is what makes it work for the people who actually use it.

Tessier's sees continued depth in RIVET's core project and milestone capabilities as the next frontier. They're also interested in scalability for smaller projects and service-style work — the ability to schedule and manage that work "all in one place" alongside their larger construction projects. The team is watching RIVET's AI development closely, with a focus on how AI can help PMs stay on site and in the field rather than being pulled into more administrative work. "Our workforce management is one of the variables that is the risk or opportunity on a job," DeNet noted. "But we place heavy importance on our project managers being on site. I'd be interested to know where you guys are at in this AI journey and how that will allow us to continue doing what we're doing, but also keep our project managers on site."