CASE STUDY

GRL Engineers Unifies Operations and Accelerates DCAA-Compliant Invoicing with NetSuite and Caravel

July 29, 2026

GRL Engineers is a specialist civil engineering firm founded in the 1970s that focuses on deep foundation testing and quality assurance, with a national footprint of about 12 offices across the United States and select work overseas. The firm’s 67 colleagues are mostly testing engineers who collect field data and analyze it using instrumentation designed and developed with sister firm Pile Dynamics. As growth accelerated over the past 10 to 15 years, CFO and Treasurer Adrian Rausche set out to modernize the internal systems that had quietly become a bottleneck to the firm’s next chapter.

Challenge

GRL had grown organically since the 1980s on a patchwork of legacy tools that no longer matched the pace or complexity of the business. Project management ran through a Microsoft Access system where a branch manager generated a job number, which administrative staff then manually keyed into QuickBooks and again into the payroll system so timekeeping could be tied back to the correct job. That triple entry was slow, error-prone and forced GRL to consider adding more administrative headcount just to keep the workflow running.

The downstream effects were significant. Managers wanted real-time visibility into project financials, but QuickBooks made it clunky to share the right slice of data with the right person. Engineers in the field were stuck emailing expense reports built in Excel, saved as PDFs and routed back and forth for approvals. And because GRL performs work for state departments of transportation, the firm carried a very specific requirement that most ERP options were not built to handle: a job costing and timekeeping system that could stand up to DCAA compliance and overhead audits. Pulling together a single DOT invoice under the old process could take a well-organized administrator up to an hour.

GRL evaluated a few options, including staying on QuickBooks with a purpose-built engineering overlay, but each path still left the firm juggling multiple systems that had to talk to each other. Rausche and his team wanted a singular platform that could unify project setup, accounting, timekeeping, expenses and DCAA-compliant invoicing under one roof, without adding more staff to hold it all together.

Solution

After weighing the alternatives, GRL selected NetSuite because it checked every box in a single system, and chose Caravel as its implementation partner to guide the firm through its first true ERP rollout. Caravel led with candid advice from the start, coaching Rausche and his team to resist the temptation to replicate every existing process inside NetSuite and instead identify the critical components the firm had to have on day one.

“One of the best pieces of advice I got at the beginning of the implementation process was from Caravel,” Rausche said. “They said, don’t try to take everything you’re doing the way you’re doing it now and push it into NetSuite. Identify the absolute critical components you have to have, get those implemented, and then use the NetSuite system.”

Caravel designed and implemented a Caravel-built DCAA compliance module on top of NetSuite to handle the government-side requirements, consolidating expenses, project rules and time-and-materials contract logic into automated invoice generation. Alongside that, the team stood up general ledger, project setup tied to a single job number, integrated timekeeping and web-based expense management so field engineers could stop routing PDFs by email.

Caravel also guided GRL through a disciplined data migration, providing clear templates and quality control steps to move trial balances into NetSuite with minimal disruption. The team targeted an aggressive three-month timeline; it took closer to six, which was still fast for an organization of GRL’s size taking on its first ERP, and Caravel and GRL landed a smooth mid-year go live on July 1.

Outcome

GRL now runs on a single, unified system that has transformed how the firm operates. DOT invoicing that once took a well-organized administrator up to an hour now takes about five minutes, because the DCAA compliance module consolidates all expenses and project rules and generates the invoice automatically. Project setup happens once, financial visibility is available to the managers who need it and field engineers submit time and expenses through a modern, web-based experience rather than a chain of emails and PDFs.

Just as important, the organization itself feels different. GRL’s offices, historically spread across the country and running semi-independently, now share a coherent operating model, and colleagues who were initially skeptical of the change say they would never go back to the old way of working. With two years of NetSuite experience under its belt, the firm is now planning a refresh to layer in more tailored processes on top of the NetSuite backbone, confident it has the foundation to keep growing without stumbling over itself.

Ready To Modernize Your ERP?

If your team is wrestling with aging systems, disconnected point solutions or an ERP that no longer fits the business, Caravel can help you chart a smarter path forward. Our NetSuite consultants lead with honest guidance, build only what you actually need and stay with you long after go live. Let’s talk about what a phased, right-sized implementation could look like for your business. Reach out to Caravel today to start the conversation.

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