How Miller Davis Gave Project Managers Real-Time Financials with Agave's Integration
How Miller Davis Gave Project Managers Real-Time Financials with Agave's Integration
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About Miller Davis
Founded in 1909 as the O.F. Miller Company and reorganized under its current name in 1936, Miller Davis has spent 117 years building across West Michigan. The construction management and general contracting firm is headquartered in Kalamazoo, with a second office in Traverse City, and has about 50 employees.
Most of its work is construction management, alongside a steady book of general-contracting and design-build projects across commercial, industrial, and government sectors. K-12 education is a particular strength: the firm's pilot project for Agave is a new $28.2 million school for New Elementary School, followed by a roughly $26.8 million parking structure.
The Problem: A Legacy ERP That Project Managers Dreaded
Miller Davis has run its accounting on Sage 300 CRE since the 1990s. In 2007, Miller Davis added Sage's PJ module for project and change management, a step forward at the time that created lasting friction: project managers were now working inside a tool built by and for accountants.
Sage's paid per-seat licenses could lock a PM out entirely when a colleague left one open, so PMs routed around it, running change management in Excel and then re-entering the same data into Sage. The result was constant double-entry and a financial picture that was always behind. Cost status reports went out only once a month, which made accounting a gatekeeper for anything more current. Pulling a contingency log from Sage took their senior PM's a minimum of an hour and a half, so she kept her own spreadsheet on the side rather than fight the system.
Sage also doesn't connect to Autodesk natively. Swapping ERPs would have been a multi-year project, and accounting wasn't the pain point, so the company chose to connect Autodesk to Sage first and find an integrator it could trust. A first attempt with another vendor lost roughly six months.
Choosing Agave
Miller Davis first heard about Agave through a customer case study featured in an Autodesk webinar. When the earlier integration stalled, two things pointed back to Agave: a direct recommendation from Autodesk, and the responsiveness of Agave's team.
What won the company over was a depth of support that single-system vendors couldn't match.
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Ariel Castillo, Director of Innovation at Miller Davis, described Agave as an interpreter between two worlds, able to speak the language of a construction company and of accounting while making sure the data worked on both the Sage and Autodesk sides. Where the prior vendor required Miller Davis to conform to its format, Agave shaped the integration around how Miller Davis already worked.
Implementation: Fast to Connect, Configured to Fit
Because Miller Davis adopted Autodesk Cost Management and Agave together, the project was as much about change management as technology. The technical connection was quick, with vendors and contacts syncing in a day. What took time, by design, was getting people comfortable and tailoring the data to how Miller Davis works.
Through regular working sessions, the Agave team tuned the sync to Miller Davis's conventions: cleaning up pay-app descriptions so a single readable line reached Sage instead of dozens of junk entries, keeping commitment change orders on one line, and treating Sage's address book as the single source of truth for vendors.
The Impact
Real-time visibility, no more double-entry
The change teams feel most is speed. Cost status that used to arrive monthly is now available on demand. Change orders, commitments, and pay apps that once lived in Excel and were re-keyed into Sage now originate in Autodesk and flow automatically.
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Change-order management at scale
Agave unlocked the ability for Miller Davis to work in Autodesk and push data to Sage, which simplified many workflows. On one of their pilots, a single bulletin drove $2.5 million in subcontract change orders across roughly $21 million in total subcontracts, touching 23 of the project's 25 subcontract agreements. Generating those change orders in one pass instead of one at a time was, in their team's words, the moment "birds were singing in the background."
Accounting is no longer a bottleneck
Self-service visibility means PMs stop interrupting finance for status, and leadership can see where a job is making or losing money without waiting on a report.
Looking Ahead
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Miller Davis frames this as one of the biggest digital transformations it will undertake this decade, and it is still early, live on two projects with more to come. The team sees faster onboarding for new PMs, who learn one modern tool instead of years of Sage workarounds, and is eyeing consolidation of its remaining manual AP work into the same connected workflow.
Asked whether he'd recommend Agave to a peer, Castillo didn't hesitate:
