%20small.png)
CCI Systems: Building The Visibility That Matters
- Ashlyn Stonge
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
CCI Systems is a 100% employee-owned telecommunications solution provider headquartered in Iron Mountain, Michigan. Founded in 1955, the company has grown to more than 1,200 employees delivering end-to-end network services, from consulting and engineering design to construction management and field services, across the country.
Pole loading analysis and make ready engineering represent one piece of that larger operation. It's a narrow but critical slice of the work CCI's engineering services division delivers for utility and telecom clients. And for Josh Rosenberry, who manages CCI's make ready engineering team, keeping that narrow piece running smoothly means being able to see exactly what's happening at every stage of the process.
That hasn't always been easy. Before CCI adopted Katapult Pro's workflow management, the field team and the office team each ran their own tracking systems. Field crews tracked their data collection work in one place. Rosenberry's back-office team tracked their engineering deliverables in another. The work got done. But the two systems didn't always line up.
“The field team has their own deliverables that they need to give, and then we have a different set of deliverables that we need to give. The trackers don't always match eye to eye, and it wasn't always the easiest thing to just mesh them together.”
- Josh Rosenberry, Project Manager, CCI Systems
The issue wasn't that projects were failing. It was that the gap between the two trackers made it hard to see the full picture. When did the field crew finish their piece? How long did it take the office team to pick it up? Was the turnaround time healthy, or was an SLA starting to slip? Those questions didn't have easy answers when the information lived in separate systems.
And when tracking depended on manual handoffs, things could fall through.
“If you're trusting Excel or emails, sometimes that email doesn't go out, and then it's just lost in the wind until somebody notices it.”
Workflow management changed that. Instead of maintaining two parallel tracking systems, CCI's field and office work now moves through a single dashboard inside Katapult Pro. As projects progress through the workflow, both sides of the operation are visible in the same place, with timestamps attached.
“The main thing I thought of was it would be a better gel-ing of the field and office team. Now, as we move through the workflow, everything just combines in the dashboard. We have all that data.”
For Rosenberry, that visibility serves a specific purpose: establishing and monitoring KPIs. With field completion dates and office pickup dates flowing through the same system, he can measure turnaround times, track SLA performance, and spot trends before they become problems.
“It comes along with dates of when the field completed this, so I can see the turnaround that it takes my team to pick it up and see whether I need to improve upon the SLAs.”
He was intentional about keeping this level of tracking within Katapult Pro, rather than
embedding it into CCI Systems’ broader, companywide project management tools. While
enterprise systems provide visibility across employees and jobs in every department,
Rosenberry needed a solution purpose built for the unique level of detail required on the pole
side of the business. Katapult Pro delivered that focus without adding unnecessary complexity.
“I use it as a way to establish KPIs and see that they're being kept up to, and track my SLA timing. I don't want to bog down that system with all the information I have on pole owners when I can just have it live in the cloud.”
Configurability was a key factor. CCI Systems supports a wide range of clients, each with
distinct requirements, pole owners, and SLAs. Rosenberry described their approach as a
flexible base workflow that supports roughly 75% of projects, with the ability to easily extend or
customize steps when a client’s process demands it. This model allows CCI to adapt quickly,
without forcing specialized work into systems designed for broader use cases.
What makes this story compelling is not a reaction to failure, but a commitment to visibility and
continuous improvement. The CCI team was delivering projects successfully, meeting expectations, and maintaining strong client relationships. At the same time, Rosenberry recognized an opportunity to gain clearer insight into how work was progressing at a granular level.
“I can't say we were having problems, because we weren't really having main problems. But this was a good way to prevent them from ever happening.”
By closing the gap between “work is getting done” and “we can clearly see how work is getting
done,” Rosenberry strengthened his ability to manage complex workflows. Rather than waiting
for a missed SLA or operational friction, he justified building visibility into his workflow, ensuring
his team had the right tools to support both current performance and long-term growth.
If your team is tracking engineering through one system and field collection through another, or managing internal expectations without timestamps you can actually measure against, the gap might not be visible yet. That's the thing about limited visibility. The problems it creates don't announce themselves. They accumulate quietly until someone notices.
What the CCI team configured isn’t overly complicated. It's a single workflow that connects field completion to office turnaround, with the configurability to adapt it per client and the data to back up every timeline conversations with something concrete.
At Katapult, we built workflow management because we've watched teams like CCI outgrow the tools they started with. When the work is getting done but you can't see how it's getting done, the next step isn't a bigger spreadsheet. It's a system that was designed for this.
Comments