About Evans General Contractors

Evans General Contractors is one of the nation's elite builders — ranked #56 on the ENR Top 400 National Contractors list, #18 in the Texas & Southeast region, and named 2025 Southeast Contractor of the Year. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, Evans has grown into a $3.2B+ revenue business with 8 US office locations (plus a Germany office), and an expanding workforce that reflects consistent and sustainable growth.

Evans specializes in large, technically demanding projects that require precision execution: data centers, advanced manufacturing and logistics facilities, life sciences, food & beverage, and healthcare. Today, roughly half their revenue comes from data centers alone: mission-critical, sophisticated work where clients expect equally sophisticated cost controls.

The Problem: Flying Blind on Billion-Dollar Projects

When Emily Rech joined Evans as VP of Manufacturing, she inherited a cost management environment that worked well enough for smaller projects but wasn't robust enough to support large complex work.

Forecasting lived in Excel. Change order logs lived in Excel. Buyout plans were tracked in Excel and executed through email chains — project coordinators pulling packages together, PMs approving over email, approvals bouncing back before someone finally entered data into Vista.

There were no system-enforced workflows. No gating logic to prevent a subcontract change order from going out before the owner had approved the corresponding owner CO. No PCO structure in Vista. No locked phase codes.

“You get to the end of the project, and we didn’t know there was a big change order log that now is going to suck up what we thought was going to be big savings.”

Emily Rech

VP of Manufacturing, Evans General Contractors

A Prior Integration that Didn’t Work

Before Agave, Evans had attempted to solve this problem with another integration vendor. After roughly five to six months of effort, here's where things stood: one pilot project, and it was a mess.The vendor had executed a bulk push of two decades of Vista data — vendors, phase codes, client records, all of it — directly into Autodesk Construction Cloud, with no data mapping and no cleanup.

The result: roughly 9,000 client records flooded ACC and duplicate vendors were everywhere. Evans spent nearly two months manually cleaning up the duplicates. Lingering issues continued to surface in downstream integrations that required clean tax ID data.

The team had lost months of momentum and trust in the integration category altogether. Leadership was clear: find something better, or stop trying.

Choosing Agave

Evans found Agave through a trusted referral from their Autodesk rep, who pointed them toward a vendor with consistently strong reviews in the field. Competitive pricing was part of the appeal. But what really stood out was expertise.The Agave implementation lead actually knew Vista and Autodesk. He could roadmap the integration, anticipate edge cases, and troubleshoot nuanced configurations in real time.

One of the first things they worked through: Evans is a GC that doesn't self-perform, which means every cost line item is lump sum — no unit-each. That's a configuration nuance that requires real product depth to solve cleanly. Agave handled it without hesitation. The prior vendor couldn't have explained it.

Regular weekly working sessions replaced the "here's your solution, good luck" handoff model. There was a clear service scope, a reliable cadence, and people on the other end of the line who understood what they were looking at. When the integration stabilized, the model shifted to troubleshooting as-needed.

The Impact of Agave for Evans

From email chains to enforceable approvals

The first and most meaningful change Agave enabled had nothing to do with speed. It had to do with control. Evans implemented two-step approval workflows for change orders and subcontracts — required documented sign-off with full audit history, not just an email chain that may or may not have reached anyone.

“Before Agave, there wasn't a lot of accountability. It was just, 'well, I emailed so-and-so.' Now we've got a historical trail with workflows and everything.”

Emily Rech

VP of Manufacturing, Evans General Contractors

For the first time, there were system-enforced guardrails preventing subcontract change orders from being issued ahead of owner approval. PCOs could be opened, evaluated, and approved in sequence. Phase codes were locked. Forecasts in Autodesk reflected what was actually happening on the job.

A single place to see the whole project

Anyone who's worked in Vista knows the multi-window problem: to see a complete project view, you're juggling windows. Autodesk, with Agave driving the sync, gives PMs a unified cost view — budgets, change orders, forecasts — in one place. The goal is to eventually move PMs out of Vista entirely for day-to-day cost work, leaving accounting in Vista while PMs live in Autodesk. Vista license reductions are the targeted outcome; three to four projects are already fully forecasting in Autodesk.

Formalized processes

Implementing Agave also forced something Evans needed independently of the software: documented, written change management workflows. Not just guardrails in the system, but actual written processes defining who opens a PCO, who evaluates it, who approves it, and in what sequence. The integration created the accountability structure needed to build better documentation and processes.

3x Faster Rollout

When Evans started the engagement, their internal expectation was that a solid integration could take up to 18 months to reach operational state. Agave got them there in roughly 6.

The contrast with their prior experience is stark. After 6 months with the previous vendor: one project, and it was a disaster. After 6 months with Agave: approximately a dozen projects running, half of them having been live for several months already."

“Where we were six months in with the old vendor and where we are six months in with Agave is light years difference. They had one project and it was a complete mess. We've got almost a dozen projects now.”

Emily Rech

VP of Manufacturing, Evans General Contractors

Built for a Company That's Growing Fast

As demand increases across data center and advanced manufacturing projects, Evans continues to evolve its operations to support a growing and increasingly complex portfolio of work. With sophisticated clients and heightened expectations around cost control, the team has focused on building the systems and rigor needed to support long-term, sustainable growth.