Lightyear Case Study: Big-D Construction

Big-D Construction is a commercial construction company delivering multi-family residential, commercial, and industrial projects across the U.S. At any given time, the company manages hundreds of active sites, each with unique connectivity requirements.

Meet the Client

Big-D Construction is a 60-year-old commercial construction group operating across the United States, with a portfolio spanning multi-family residential, commercial, and industrial projects. Today, Big-D operates hundreds of active projects at any given time, as well as a network of permanent offices, and supports 1,800+ employees.

Ryan McNabb, Vice President of Technology at Big-D Construction, runs a 25-person IT team responsible for approximately 1,200 of those employees, their offices, and a constant stream of active project sites, each with fundamentally different connectivity needs. Offices run on a standardized model, primary fiber with a secondary network backup, while project sites are a different story. Connectivity requirements vary widely by scope and duration, from month-to-month setups for smaller builds to multi-year infrastructure contracts. And if managing the network wasn’t enough, Ryan's team also handles help desk support, systems administration, cybersecurity, and data. With this large pool of responsibilities, keeping a constantly growing, geographically dispersed company connected becomes a challenge. 

Ryan sat down with Lightyear to discuss how Big-D was able to tackle this task by unifying its sprawling network with a single solution.

Herding Cats Across Hundreds of Sites

Before Lightyear, managing the network at Big-D Construction was, as Ryan puts it, "a little bit chaotic and more like herding cats." 

The problem started with procurement. Project sites had two options: procure internet themselves or escalate to IT. In practice, both created problems. Sites that went direct to providers sometimes purchased consumer-grade solutions, signed contracts longer than necessary (causing a payout fee when they needed to leave early), and left IT without visibility into what services existed where. When IT handled procurement directly, requirements were met, but the administrative burden was significant. Researching carriers, finalizing agreements, chasing invoices, and managing a fragmented vendor landscape consumed a disproportionate amount of the team’s time. 

With two different ways of procurement, the billing picture became particularly painful. Without a consolidated view, invoices from multiple vendors landed across IT and accounting each month, and connecting costs to the right project required a large amount of manual effort.

Ryan considered aggregators as a solution, but found them limiting. Traditional aggregators required full account control and pushed long-term, site-by-site contracts: a poor fit for a construction company where project durations and needs range. Instead, he needed a solution flexible enough to adapt to an ever-growing set of varying project timelines and requirements.

One Platform, Clear Visibility

While Ryan's team was actively evaluating aggregators, a Lightyear sales rep reached out. The differentiation was clear immediately: rather than locking them into rigid, long-term agreements managed by a third party, Lightyear provided a platform that put the control back into IT’s hands.

Big-D decided to come on board with Lightyear's full suite of services, starting with Network Inventory and Expense Management. Existing services were ingested into the platform, giving IT a single view across the entire network footprint and empowering the full telecom lifecycle. As a closed-loop solution with procurement already layered in, project teams and business units could now route connectivity requests through IT in a standardized way, without the administrative overhead.

The impact was immediate for Ryan's billing coordinator, who had previously spent a large amount of time each month reconciling invoices across carriers. Lightyear's custom cost code column and consolidated invoice turned a once-week-long process into a matter of hours.

Cost Savings Surfaced Without Legwork

The shift to Lightyear not only produced immediate improvements for billing and time management but also uncovered additional cost savings. When Lightyear ingested existing services, it also conducted a full network audit. The audit identified circuits that were redundant or overpriced. Where contracts allowed, Big-D moved to better rates immediately; where commitments remained, they transitioned at the end of the term. 

And going forward, Ryan no longer has to wonder whether they're getting the best available rates or have been locked into incorrect contracts — that work is happening automatically through Lightyear’s proprietary network and pricing intelligence.

With all services consolidated in one place, Ryan also has visibility into performance trends, provider reliability, and cost patterns across the portfolio. That data informs conversations with business unit leaders and keeps IT ahead of changes — whether that means evaluating Starlink versus 5G across different site types or anticipating what's coming next and making the most cost-effective approach. 

What’s Next: Empowering the Larger Team

Ryan's next phase with Lightyear is continuing to empower his team by extending into self-service procurement. The goal: give project teams direct access to the Lightyear portal so they can pull connectivity quotes during the bid stage, allowing them to build accurate internet costs into project estimates before contracts are even won. Starting at the RFP stage will also give IT earlier visibility into upcoming projects, allowing them to proactively plan connectivity setup and implementation. 

With Lightyear's expanded expense management capabilities, Ryan can also pursue strategies like transparently allocating internet costs directly to each project site — moving away from IT absorbing those costs and giving jobs full visibility into what they're spending. 

For a construction company focused on keeping project costs clean and IT lean, that level of strategic flexibility is critical. For Ryan, Lightyear isn't just solving today's problems; it's a platform he can build a strategy around.