From Monthly to Near-Daily: How Consumers Concrete Corporation Closes the Books Faster with SmartConnect

Consumers Concrete Corporation has been a part of Michigan’s construction landscape since 1933, when it started out as a sand and gravel company. Since 2016, the company has transitioned to focusing solely on concrete manufacturing and distribution. Today, the locally owned company has 23 locations across southwest Michigan, providing both ready-mix concrete and concrete products for commercial and residential use.

Steve Humiston has been the company’s Systems Engineer for nearly 10 years, overseeing IT infrastructure across all 23 locations. In 2025, Consumers Concrete’s longtime SQL administrator retired, and the responsibility for the company’s database landed squarely on Steve’s shoulders.

Steve found himself working in a platform he had never used before: Microsoft Dynamics GP. At the same time, the company was starting to reconsider some of the other software they relied on for their everyday workflows.

Consumers Concrete had been using Command Alkon, a well-established player in the construction industry software space. While the software worked well for their niche industry, Consumers Concrete found themselves looking for more cost-effective solutions that provided better flexibility.

The leadership team at Consumers Concrete landed on BCMI, which offered better reporting and scheduling efficiency for the trucking side of the business. This was critical for a company whose ready-mix trucks need to arrive back-to-back to keep large pours moving without delay. Consumers Concrete switched to BCMI for truck scheduling and logistics, but they still needed to get that data to flow into GP for their accounting team.

When Consumers Concrete asked BCMI for an integration recommendation, they only had one answer: SmartConnect. Steve began working closely with the eOne team to learn the platform, and it wasn’t long before he was building connectors and managing integrations on his own.

Don’t be afraid to dive right in; [SmartConnect] is very intuitive. If you have somebody with any kind of scripting skills at all, you should be able to get just about anything you want out of it.

Steve Humiston, Systems Engineer

Because of SmartConnect’s intuitive interface, Steve was able to quickly master the platform and develop scripts that improved reporting for sales, finance, and operations teams. “I’m an old dog, and you taught me a new trick,” said Steve.

Using SmartConnect, Steve was able to link BCMI to GP, which let Consumers Concrete begin invoicing directly out of BCMI and retire Integra, so they’re no longer paying for that separate system. In addition to that, they were able to tap into a read replica via ODBC to pull truck data for reporting and analysis, giving them the ability to export and reformat data on demand.

SmartConnect also replaced Microsoft’s Report Manager, a tool that the previous SQL administrator had relied on to build every report by hand. Now Steve builds those reports and writes scripts so his team can review and edit them on their own, allowing them to be more self-sufficient when reporting on their data.

The impact on the business has been significant, giving leadership better visibility into cash flow. “We were closing billing per month,” says Steve, “we’re really close to being able to close daily now, and that’s all because of using eOne and the reporting we can do.”

Steve also praised eOne’s support team for going above and beyond the scope of a typical vendor relationship, providing assistance with Dynamics GP database questions without passing off responsibility.

The few times I needed to call support in the past were usually because I didn’t understand what was going on in GP, not necessarily because of [SmartConnect]. Your support team didn’t say, ‘this isn’t a SmartConnect issue’. They helped me, and I can’t say how crazy that is today.

Steve Humiston, Systems Engineer

The Future of GP and SmartConnect

Consumers Concrete currently runs GP on-premises, alongside an on-prem Exchange. With GP end-of-life quickly approaching, Steve acknowledged there may be plans to migrate off GP in the future. Until that time, eOne is dedicated to supporting GP customers like Steve with new functionality built around delivering faster, more reliable integrations on the system they choose to work in.

In the meantime, Steve plans to upgrade to New SmartConnect and take advantage of these upgraded functionalities when the on-premises version is released this fall. Steve remains a SmartConnect advocate, recommending the solution to others. “I tell everybody that SmartConnect is the way to go,” says Steve, emphasizing its intuitive design and capability to deliver complex data integrations without an extensive technical background.