From Patchwork to Platform: How Dickinson Ready Mix Stopped Fighting Its Own Software

The Company

Dickinson Ready Mix (DRM) is a family-owned concrete producer serving Southwest and Central North Dakota. The company just celebrated its 75th anniversary, tracing its roots back to 1950, and has been family-owned and operated since 1961. Ben Olin, the company's Vice President and General Manager, is the third generation of the Olin family to run the business, following his grandfather and father before him.

That family continuity runs deep at DRM. Three generations of Olins have shaped the company's approach to the business, and Ben speaks about the company's future in the same terms he speaks about its past: as a multi-generational commitment to the region it serves, not just a job. Dickinson operates in a remote stretch of the country, far from the density and infrastructure of larger metro markets, and that geography shapes how the company thinks about reliability, communication, and who it partners with. Being far from major population centers means DRM can't afford long response times when something goes wrong, whether that's a piece of equipment, a system, or a vendor relationship.

Ben is looking forward to leading the company for decades more, a continuation of three generations of family stewardship rather than a new chapter starting from scratch. That long view shows up in how DRM approaches technology decisions: not as one-off purchases, but as long-term commitments meant to serve the business for years.

The Challenge

Before Sysdyne, Dickinson Ready Mix ran its day-to-day operations on a patchwork of disconnected systems. Batching ran on one platform, GPS tracking ran on another with no connection to dispatch, billing was its own separate process, and dispatch itself ran on an on-premise system. Tickets and vehicle inspection records were still handled on paper. None of these systems were built to talk to each other, and that lack of communication created constant friction throughout the day.

Ben describes what happened when one of those systems inevitably broke down or fell out of sync with the others in stark terms:

"When one of those didn't communicate, it was like putting a match on gasoline. Everything else failed after that."

That's not an exaggeration of a minor inconvenience. A breakdown in one system meant billing delays, tracking gaps, and manual scrambling to reconcile what should have been a single, connected picture of the day's operations.

On top of these challenges, North Dakota's Department of Transportation began pushing e-ticketing requirements, and Dickinson's existing dispatch setup couldn't keep pace with what the DOT was asking for. That deadline pressure is what pushed Dickinson to seriously evaluate a modern, cloud-based platform rather than continuing to patch around an aging system.

But the DOT mandate was really a catalyst for addressing a much longer list of goals Dickinson had been carrying for some time: simplifying and accelerating billing and invoicing, connecting GPS tracking directly into dispatch to improve driver turnaround, replacing its aging dispatch system outright, digitizing driver vehicle inspection reports to bring down fleet maintenance costs, and getting payroll costs under control through digital timekeeping. E-ticketing was the trigger, but the underlying problem was a business that had outgrown a set of tools never designed to work together in the first place.

THE SOLUTION

Dickinson evaluated several vendors before selecting Sysdyne, initially to solve the e-ticketing requirement that had become urgent. What made the difference wasn't just the product fit, it was the experience of getting there. Ben describes onboarding in unambiguous terms:

"It was a seamless onboarding, seamless explanation. Everything that we wanted, we got and more."

That initial deal in 2023 brought ConcreteGo, DeliveryGo, and QuickLink online, solving the immediate e-ticketing need and connecting GPS tracking to dispatch for the first time. Slabstack was added the same year, extending the platform into CRM and quoting. Early in 2025, Dickinson added BatchGo, bringing batching onto the same connected platform as everything else. What started as a single-issue fix aimed squarely at a DOT deadline had, within about two years, become a full-platform adoption spanning quoting, dispatch, batching, delivery, and accounting sync.

For Ben, the real payoff wasn't any single feature but the experience of watching all of it work together for the first time. After years of running six or more disconnected programs that fought each other for basic communication, seeing dispatch, batching, delivery, and quoting operate as one coherent system was, in his words, a genuine "wow moment." That shift changed how Dickinson's own team worked day to day. Where dispatch, tracking, and billing used to require separate manual steps and constant cross-checking, the team could now trust that information moving through one part of the platform would show up correctly everywhere else it needed to.

Sysdyne's support played a meaningful role in building the confidence to commit to that level of change, particularly given Dickinson's remote location. When something didn't work as expected, whether during onboarding or in day-to-day use afterward, the responsiveness of Sysdyne's team gave Dickinson the assurance to keep moving forward rather than second-guessing the decision. That kind of trust matters more for a company operating far from major metro centers, where a slow vendor response can mean a much longer wait for a fix than it would for a company closer to a major hub.

Once Slabstack and ConcreteGo were both live, the sales process itself changed in a way that touched Dickinson's small sales team directly. With just two people running sales, pricing and dispatch had previously required real manual duplication: building a project in ConcreteGo, then separately keeping track of the pricing that had already been worked out elsewhere. With both platforms connected, a quote built in Slabstack now flows straight into ConcreteGo with its pricing and project details intact, removing a step the team used to manage entirely by hand.

The platform's flexibility was tested for real when Dickinson completed a confidential acquisition of several plants, vehicles, and pieces of equipment, all under an NDA that required the whole process to be handled quietly. The Sysdyne and Slabstack teams ran plant installs, system implementations, and staff training across the newly acquired locations, bringing all of it fully onto the platform and into production within three months. As Ben put it:

"Without the Sysdyne team and their willingness to get it done and expedite several things, I don't think we would have been as successful in that acquisition."

THE RESULTS

The most immediate and visible result was the complete elimination of paper from Dickinson's ticketing process. What had been a paper-driven system became fully digital, cutting printing costs and removing a physical bottleneck from the delivery process altogether. That shift paired directly with a real acceleration in how quickly Dickinson gets paid: moving tickets straight from ConcreteGo into QuickBooks through QuickLink cut out the manual work of tracking down paperwork before an invoice could even be created. Ben estimates that change has reduced days sales outstanding by 20 to 30 percent since implementation, a meaningful improvement in cash flow for a business of Dickinson's size.

The impact reached beyond back-office efficiency into how Dickinson's customers and contractors experience working with the company. Because tickets and batching data move through the platform in real time, contractors on a job site know what's going out the door as soon as it's batched, the same moment Dickinson's own team knows it. That visibility builds a level of trust that paper tickets and disconnected systems never could, and Ben points to it as part of a broader story about what modern technology signals to the customers and contractors Dickinson works with day to day.

Dickinson has continued to grow since modernizing its technology stack. Ben ties that growth directly to having a connected, cloud-based platform in place, not as a coincidence but as an enabler: the technology gives the team the confidence and the operational bandwidth to move quickly when opportunities come along, rather than being weighed down by systems that can barely keep up with the business as it already exists.

That same cloud-based foundation changed how Dickinson's team works day to day, well beyond the office. Because both Sysdyne and Slabstack run in the cloud, quotes can get built, mix designs can get adjusted, and daily operations can get managed from a phone or tablet in the field, whether that's at a job site or, as Ben describes it, sitting in an airport handling a question that would have once required being back at a desk. Ben doesn't have a single hard number to put on that flexibility, but he's clear that it has produced a real return on the investment simply in what it has made possible for how the team operates.

Asked what he'd tell another operator on the fence about making the same move away from legacy, disconnected systems, Ben didn't hesitate:

"Just do it. You won't regret it. When things are communicating properly, it reduces the headaches that you have throughout the day."