Digital QA a “game changer” for MS Civil during rapid growth
Civil Infrastructure/Roading Maintenance
MS Civil
Carolyn Gardner
Surfacing Manager
Waikato
New Zealand
600% growth demands systems that can keep up
MS Civil has been maintaining roads across the Waikato and Bay of Plenty for nearly a decade. In less than 2 years, they have grown sevenfold, moving from subcontractor to principal contractor, holding five reseal contracts directly. That shift brought more accountability, more volume, and an equally growing QA obligation. Carolyn, who manages the surfacing operation, knew the systems that had served them as a smaller business were no longer fit for the scale they were operating at.
When the volume grows, the paperwork grows with it
Roading maintenance contracts don't come with a light administrative load. Last season, MS Civil managed more than 400 sites. Each and every one requires spray sheets, chip test results, binder results, and photographic evidence; all of which needs to be collated, organised, and submitted to the client to support their claim. Before CONQA, that process lived entirely in local file directories, email threads, and manual spreadsheets. Files were organised by whoever happened to file them, which meant that at month end, pulling together a complete submission was a slow, unreliable, and high-stakes exercise. Miss a file and a line item gets held. A held item delays payment. For a contractor turning over millions of dollars a month across multiple contracts, that risk compounds fast.
"If the QA is not there, they can hold that item in the claim. When we're doing millions of dollars of work in a month, holding up millions of dollars of payment is not okay for a business of our size."
“At the end of the month, if we've done a hundred sites, I would have to be emailing through spreadsheets, chip test results, binder test results, photos of sites, all of that... I would have had to hire another full-time person.”
Carolyn Gardner, MS Civil
The human cost of lagging QA
Beyond the administrative drag, the fragmented system had a downstream effect on the whole team. When documentation was missing, Carolyn had to go looking for it. This meant pulling supervisors, operations managers, and sometimes foremen away from critical work to track down photos or reconstruct records. Skilled people were being used for unskilled tasks, and the operations that actually generated revenue were being interrupted to support a reporting process that should have run quietly in the background. Across five contracts, Carolyn estimates the burden was equivalent to a full-time role.
"Growing so quickly puts massive pressure on the team around our systems and processes to increase that capability very, very rapidly."
A solution built for roading maintenance
Carolyn has had years of experience building and working with QA systems at Downer and came to the evaluation process knowing exactly what she needed and what most solutions got wrong. With CONQA, their project structure was configured to match their NZTA state highway ITP requirements: one checklist per dispatch, records organised by work type and scheduled month, with bulk exports that aligned directly to the monthly claim cycle.
"We exited the trial stage fairly early on. We went 'absolutely yes, this is going to work.'"
When the asphalt division was brought on, they moved off the Excel spreadsheets they'd been using for years and started capturing photos directly from site in real time.
“Being able to put the photos directly into CONQA? Game changer.”
Carolyn Gardner, MS Civil
When rapid growth pays off
The shift has been tangible across the whole operation. End-of-month closeouts that once required days of chasing and compiling now run cleanly, with evidence already attached to each site record and bulk exports ready for the claim cycle. Carolyn estimates approximately two days of administrative work have been recovered every month, and across five contracts she no longer needs the additional headcount she would otherwise have had to hire. Clients have direct visibility of QA records without Carolyn having to compile and send anything, which has removed an entire layer of weekly coordination and the meetings that used to go with it. For NZTA, who made a considered decision to award a significant reseal programme to a tier 2 contractor, that visibility also removed risk from their side of the relationship.
"NZTA had instant access to see that yes, everything was being managed just as well as a tier one contractor. Just having clarity over what we're doing took risk off their plate."
Carolyn's advice to anyone in the same position
"Just hurry up and do it. Moving to a new system can feel like a huge deterrent because of the setup time, but it really hasn't required much at all. For anybody else wanting to get on board, I don't know why they wouldn't."
For MS Civil, a structured maintenance QA approach isn't a back-office function. It's part of how the business earns trust, protects revenue, and scales without losing control across hundreds of sites each season.
See how CONQA works
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