How Fleming Removed the Burden of Double-Entry with Agave
How Fleming Removed the Burden of Double-Entry with Agave
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About Fleming
Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Mesa, Arizona, Fleming is a commercial construction company that operates two divisions under one roof. Fleming West Building Company is a steel erection subcontractor that erects the steel support structure of a building: the columns and beams that hold up the walls and roof. Its work stands behind Terminal 3 at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, ASU's Mullett Arena and professional athletic practice facilities, NAU's performance center, and industrial and other widespan buildings.
As longtime clients began asking Fleming West for help improving their facilities, the company launched Fleming Complete, a licensed commercial general contractor handling tenant improvements, add-ons, and non-steel ground-up work. Fleming West serves large general contractors on airport, military, higher-education, and large distribution projects, while Fleming Complete is built for multi-site operators, property managers, and developers who want "one company, one call" for vetted trades. More than 70% of Fleming West's business is repeat customers, and demand has pulled the company beyond Arizona into New Mexico, with Nevada next.
The Problem: Everything Was Manual
Before Agave, Fleming ran on re-keying. Project information was entered by hand into Foundation, the company's accounting ERP, while documents were saved to servers, emailed widely, and re-entered across systems. Invoices arrived by mail and email, were printed, routed for approval, and keyed in again. Even after Fleming moved invoice routing into Foundation's document imaging, the work stayed heavy: job setup, budget entry, subcontracts, lien waivers, and invoices all demanded labor and meetings.
The friction showed up most in accounts payable. A vendor invoice would land with accounting, who could reject it, then pass it to a project manager through Foundation. Every handoff added delay, and the back-and-forth happened in side channels where no one could see the full picture. With the same data entered into both the project management system and the accounting system, human error was baked in.
Accounting was asking for more people. As bigger projects loomed, the assumption was that Fleming would need to keep hiring to keep pace.
Choosing Agave
Agave was a surprise. When Fleming selected Autodesk Construction Cloud as its project management platform, the company didn't know an integration with Foundation existed. During Autodesk training and setup, Fleming was pointed to Agave as the suggested integration path to Foundation. Accounting had been asking for more help, but with Agave, Fleming realized the opposite was possible. Davina Ford, Business Operations Manager at Fleming, remembers thinking: PMs should be able to handle everything based on the automation. Fleming reorganized roles around that bet.
Implementation
After configuring Autodesk, Ford braced for an equally heavy lift with Agave and found the opposite. "It was like going from something infinitely complicated to Agave being really simple, and it totally confused me," she says. "You required very little of me." Coming from systems that demand constant client effort, the simplicity was disorienting. Early help-center gaps around Foundation documentation were resolved when Agave's team updated the help system.
A year in, the lesson has stuck across the team. "Now I understand: they take care of that. You just tell them what you need, they'll tell us what they need, and that's it. Just let them handle what they do."
The Impact
One entry, more confidence
Vendor invoices now come in through Autodesk, where the PM approves them, and Agave pushes them straight into Foundation. That removed three steps: the initial accounting handling, the PM back-and-forth, and the separate data entry into Foundation. Because data is entered once instead of re-keyed across systems, the disputes have faded.
A leaner accounting function
Fleming had a full-time dedicated project accountant (PA). Within a month of go-live, the PA had spare time, because Agave was the heavy data transfers. That role now runs at about a third of its former time, and the bigger projects Fleming expected to staff up for required no new accounting hires.
PMs own the work, and reporting stays current
Project Managers now own approvals and billings end to end, generating AIA billings and watching their own WIP and cost-to-complete reports. Knowing Agave feeds Autodesk into Foundation within about an hour, they move faster to keep numbers accurate ahead of Monday leadership reviews. And because Autodesk is far easier to reach than Foundation, on phone, tablet, or desktop, updates happen more readily and reports stay current.
A wider hiring pool
With the workflow simplified, Fleming brought on two Assistant Project Managers (APMs) to run smaller projects. Lowering the experience required for back-office roles lets the company hire for potential and offer career growth, instead of competing for scarce, expensive senior talent.
Looking Ahead
Fleming's roadmap is shaped by client-driven schedule swings, with some contracted projects pushed out as far as two years. As bandwidth allows, Leadership wants to deepen AP and materials automation on the Fleming West supplier side, integrate the Autodesk reports she relied on for qualifications, and eventually automate client-side billing once the team is ready. The throughline is doing more without adding inboxes or systems to monitor.
Asked to describe Agave in a sentence, Ford reaches for an image: "It's like a little electronic person running between two systems, feeding all of the information. It literally allows you to focus your business efforts elsewhere. Let that little Agave person run back and forth and do the craziness between the two systems, find the errors, fix the errors." Her trust is the proof. "I have not logged in this week. That's how much I trust the system. I look at the statistics and the emails and think, I don't need to look at it today."
