The situation
The client — a US precast concrete manufacturer operating multiple production plants and serving construction projects across many states — handles a significant volume of work on public and federally funded projects subject to prevailing wage law. Davis-Bacon, state prevailing wage statutes, and the associated certified payroll reporting requirements are not optional in that part of the business. They are the work.
Prevailing wage compliance is engineering-hard. Every worker on a covered project has a specific trade classification with its own rate, varying by jurisdiction. Fringe benefit accounting has its own rules. Crew members work across multiple classifications and multiple projects in the same pay period. Certified payroll reports (federal WH-347, state equivalents, agency-specific portals) have to be generated cleanly and submitted reliably, every cycle, without error.
The client had built a custom solution over years. A migration to ADP’s workforce management and payroll platforms — ADP WFM and ADP Workforce Now — forced a major overhaul, and they didn’t have internal resources to rebuild the engine. They first evaluated a leading specialist prevailing-wage software product. It couldn’t accommodate their custom requirements. They came to RJR.
How we approached it
We designed and built a comprehensive prevailing wage and certified payroll engine connecting five platforms:
- ADP WFM — workforce management and source of time and labor data
- ADP Workforce Now — payroll execution
- IFS — the client’s ERP, where projects and job costing live
- LCPtracker — certified payroll reporting destination for compliance submission
- Google Maps APIs — mileage and shortest-route calculation between job sites
The engine calculates gross pay with the correct prevailing wage rate for each worker, on each project, on each day — honoring trade classifications, jurisdictional rates, and fringe rules. It handles workers spanning multiple classifications in a single pay period using the blended logic FLSA and prevailing wage jointly require. And it produces certified payroll outputs in the formats the reporting channels actually accept.
Mileage integration via Google Maps APIs computes shortest-route distances between plants and job sites, feeding travel-pay calculations that used to be managed by hand. IFS integration ties wage calculations back to the project data that drives job costing. ADP integration carries calculated pay into payroll execution cleanly.
Why specialist software couldn’t do it
The specialist prevailing-wage software market exists because the problem is hard enough to warrant dedicated products. But specialist software wins on the common case and loses on the complicated one. Construction operations are rarely general — multi-plant, multi-state, mixed manufacturing-and-field work, custom fringe structures, and ERP integration requirements that vary by client — and that’s where off-the-shelf products run out of room. This client’s operations were edge-case-heavy in exactly that pattern.
Custom engineering that fits the client’s actual operations is the principle we work from. Here, it was also the only option that could actually deliver.
Outcome
- Custom prevailing wage engine live across ADP WFM, ADP Workforce Now, IFS, LCPtracker, and Google Maps APIs
- Automated gross pay calculation honoring prevailing wage rates, classifications, and jurisdictional rules across the full project portfolio
- Automated mileage and travel-pay calculation replacing a previously manual process
- Certified payroll reporting flowing cleanly into LCPtracker and other compliance destinations
- ADP migration completed without loss of prevailing wage compliance integrity — new platform, new engine, new integrations, all working
What this demonstrates
Construction payroll engineering at the intersection of prevailing wage law, multi-system integration, and operational reality. Custom engineering that outperforms a market-leading specialist product when client operations are complex enough that general-purpose software can’t fit. Multi-platform fluency across ADP’s workforce management and payroll platforms, IFS, and operational APIs — the pattern of integration work we do repeatedly across industries. And the RJR principle expressed in compliance-critical work: build to fit the client’s operations, not the vendor’s template.