Customer story · Civil & infrastructure

400 sites a season, claimed with the evidence already attached.

MS Civil has maintained roads across the Waikato and Bay of Plenty for nearly a decade. In two years the business grew sevenfold – from subcontractor to principal contractor, holding five reseal contracts directly. The QA record that backs every claim now builds in CONQA as the work happens.

“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.”

Carolyn Gardner, Surfacing Manager, MS Civil

The job

Last season MS Civil managed more than 400 sites. Every one needs spray sheets, chip test results, binder results and photos, collated and submitted to support the monthly claim. Before CONQA that evidence lived in local file directories, email threads and spreadsheets, filed by whoever happened to file it. Miss a file and the 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.

The admin wasn’t the whole cost. When documentation went missing, supervisors, operations managers and foremen were pulled off the works to track down photos or reconstruct records. Across five contracts, Carolyn puts the burden at a full-time role.

MS Civil crew paving at night, a tipper feeding the paver
Night works on the network
A bitumen sprayer applying binder on a state highway reseal
Resealing in progress

What changed

Carolyn spent years building QA systems at Downer and came to the evaluation knowing what most tools get wrong. MS Civil’s project structure was configured to match their NZTA state highway ITP requirements: one checklist per dispatch, records organised by work type and scheduled month, bulk exports aligned to the monthly claim cycle. When the asphalt division came on, they moved off the spreadsheets they’d used for years and started capturing photos from site in real time.

“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, Surfacing Manager, MS Civil

What the client sees

NZTA made a considered decision awarding a significant reseal programme to a tier 2 contractor. The record answered the question that comes with it: “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.”

Clients see the QA record directly, without Carolyn compiling and sending anything – which also removed a layer of weekly coordination and the meetings that went with it.

Since then

Month-end close-out runs clean, with evidence already attached to each site record and bulk exports ready for the claim cycle. Her advice to anyone weighing the move: “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.”

2days

Administrative work recovered every month across five contracts – and the extra full-time hire never made.

“Being able to put the photos directly into CONQA? Game changer.”

Carolyn Gardner, Surfacing Manager, MS Civil Read how claims get held

See it on work like yours.

CONQA matches your NZTA ITP structure, captures evidence on site, and has the claim pack ready at month-end.

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