At a Glance
Locations
Beaverton, OR, and Irvine, CA
Founded
1981
Employees
4,000
Specialty
Business-software products and services
Annual Sales
$857.8 million
By providing solutions across the construction lifecycle—from business development and preconstruction, through construction, and on to postconstruction and facilities management—Sage North America has acquired more than 3.2 million business customers in the 35 years since its inception. “The Sage Construction and Real Estate business unit is the market leader in providing construction-specific business-management software solutions,” says Jon Witty, vice president and general manager of construction and real estate solutions for the company. “Sixty-five percent of the Engineering News-Record’s [ENR] top 400 contractors use Sage. They are among over 40,000 construction and real estate companies using Sage’s trusted construction software solutions today.” This kind of dominance in the market is possible thanks to the firm’s diverse offerings, which it continues to improve upon daily.
Sage’s success is nothing new. In fact, the company’s product lines have long been recognized as the most widely used applications in construction-productivity and real estate solutions. Through its various products, including Sage Timberline Enterprise, Sage Timberline Office, Sage Master Builder, Sage Estimating, and Sage Peachtree, the company is able to offer customers solutions for construction estimating, job costing, accounting, payroll, and project management. “By integrating all of our customers’ management processes, our construction- and real estate-management solutions help maximize their company’s productivity as well as profitability,” Witty says. “They also allow for greater visibility and transparency into the business.”
Top 4 Software Offerings from Sage North America
1. Sage Timberline Office is a comprehensive suite of construction-management software and real estate-management applications that helps streamline a company’s business processes. It also helps maximize profit potential by providing modular solutions. This management system can also be customized to fit a company’s specific needs.
2. Sage Master Builder offers a construction-specific functionality that addresses all phases of a business’s profit cycle, including estimating, job-cost accounting, operations, and analysis. Designed to improve efficiency, it eliminates the need to use multiple systems and offers small construction companies a way to manage their entire business in a more productive fashion than that allowed by typical accounting software.
3. Sage Timberline Estimating helps companies bid on multiple jobs at once by producing fast and accurate estimates. It also helps companies curb risks and maximize profits by automating the entire estimating procedure.
4. Sage Timberline Enterprise integrates accounting, estimating, job-management, and service-management processes for service and specialty contractors. This can help maximize a company’s productivity and provide it with further opportunities to look deeper into its business.
By working together with leading industry experts and companies such as BuilderMT and HomeFront Software, Sage also provides software solutions targeted at specific segments within the construction industry, such as residential building. “Sage works closely with a growing number of software developers so construction firms can have access to seamlessly integrated, end-to-end construction-management solutions that are exactly right for their specific business,” Witty says. As members of Sage’s development-partner program, HomeFront Software and BuilderMT provide specialized production-management systems that extend the functionality of Sage Timberline Office—the most widely used business-management solution in the industry—for custom and production homebuilders.
Looking ahead, Sage is focused on developing new software solutions to better assist construction and real estate companies who struggle to stay organized with so much remote work being done out of the office on job sites and elsewhere. “The construction industry balances back-office functions—billing, paying invoices, running financial reports, payroll, planning logistics—with the physical presence needed on the job site or in a client’s office,” Witty says. “Today’s technological solutions must be able to serve users in both work settings.” In today’s fluctuating construction market, with the consolidation of some offices, the decentralization of others, the high number of travel-based positions, and some firms reaching to take on projects in different regions of the country or even internationally, Sage’s ability to offer solid remote-access technology has become a critical part of its business.
“Our new cloud services will enable us to serve even more users,” Witty says. “Not only can Sage’s construction-cloud services help an individual company stay organized and become more efficient; they can also extend beyond the workings of a single construction company and help construction professionals become more collaborative.”
Sage’s move to expand its offerings to include more operations-focused users opens the business up to a new segment of the market and allows it to grow its client base of mobile and collaborative external partners. It has also helped Sage Construction and Real Estate secure a position in the Constructech 50 three years in a row. “As Constructech’s 2011 IT survey notes, ‘Today’s construction professional needs to be highly collaborative. The word “team” has taken on a whole new meaning in the construction industry.’” Witty says. “We see that as an opportunity to better connect all project-team members and to improve our technologies. It’s also an opportunity for us to add to our growing list of customers.” Both of these are sure to come as the firm continues to expand its software line. ABQ
