How Central Service Group achieved a short, five-week go-live on BuildOps with Smart Deploy

Company snapshot

The challenge

Central Service Group was running a system that didn't match how they actually operate. It was heavier on features they didn't need, light on the speed they did. The clearest symptom was invoicing: what should have been a quick turn from a finished service call to a paid invoice was instead stretching out over several days.

"It was too complex for what we were needing to do," Cameron Kersztyn, GM of Central Service Group said.

The solution

Kersztyn ran demos for both the office and the field technicians, and the decision was easy: BuildOps was the platform built for how a commercial contractor actually works.

What sealed it was Smart Deploy, BuildOps' guided implementation path built from more than 750 launches. It pairs a self-guided setup tool with a best-practice playbook and hands-on coaching from an implementation team — designed to get commercial contractors from signed contract to running their business without the months-long wait of a traditional implementation. 

Instead of routing every change through an implementation specialist, Kersztyn ran the setup himself — uploading data, adjusting it, seeing results immediately.

BuildOps Academy gave him a full library of training to draw on at his own pace, on his own schedule, without pulling Stephanie Macias (Director of Finance) or the rest of the team off their day-to-day work.

A short go-live

The result: a full go-live in five weeks — faster than the roughly eight weeks Kersztyn expected, and a fraction of the sixteen weeks their previous rollout, had taken.

"I was being very optimistic saying five weeks," he said. "Getting there with Smart Deploy has blown me away. Even if you're a smaller shop coming from paper tickets, it will walk you through everything. It's not a complicated system. It's very user friendly."

The results

The clearest change since going live is how fast a finished job turns into a paid invoice — down from several days to same-day. Technicians send job notes straight to the customer from the site, and dispatch has real-time visibility into where every ticket stands.

Time tracking improved too. Instead of estimating hours from GPS pings, Macias can now see technicians clock in and out directly. "It's a big improvement for me," she said.

Even the built-in AI support won him over. "It's looking through its large catalog of support material, trying to find the exact answer I need," Kersztyn said.

Payroll is next on the list. Once it's live alongside time tracking, dispatch, and invoicing, Kersztyn expects having all four under one system to save hours of manual reporting work every week.

Asked what he'd tell another commercial contractor weighing the switch, Kersztyn didn't hedge: "If you want something that fits the way you already work, instead of being forced to change everything — there's no reason to look beyond BuildOps."