The situation
A fast-growing plumbing company running multiple engineers, dozens of service calls a day and thousands of customer records. As it scaled, the existing CRM and the manual workflows around it became the constraint on the whole business.
Day-to-day operations ran on spreadsheets, manual scheduling, fragmented communication and job notes written out by hand. The CRM did not match how the company actually worked, so roughly 70% of its features went unused while the ones they needed were missing entirely.
What we found
- Scheduling done by hand by the PA3–4 hrs per day
- Timesheet verification and correction10+ hrs per week
- Engineers on manual reporting and phone-based admin5+ hrs per week
- Management reconciling timesheets and locating missing data10 hrs per month
- Total quantified operational waste$23,400 per month
What we built
- 1A custom admin dashboard with drag-and-drop scheduling, real-time job assignment against engineer availability, and status that advances itself as an engineer moves through a job
- 2GPS-verified timesheets through geofenced clock-in and clock-out, an exception interface for the anomalies, and one-click payroll export
- 3An internal assistant handling invoice generation, quote creation, job reports, troubleshooting guidance and real-time lookups such as what was charged last time
- 4Hands-free voice reporting for engineers, so completion notes, parts used, customer notes and invoice items are spoken, structured and saved without anyone typing
- 5Messaging over WhatsApp with an intent router behind it: booking requests create jobs, status questions answer themselves, complaints escalate to a manager
- 6A plumbing-specific CRM built around their workflow, with unlimited engineers, no per-user pricing, and full ownership of the software and the data
- 7Reporting covering a live engineer map, job pipeline, profitability, engineer performance, revenue forecasting, customer lifetime value and first-time fix rates
- 8A two-week parallel run against the old system, daily backups, a staged rollout and full staff training
What is expected
Nothing in this section is a measured result. Any before-and-after figures are the delivered system as the client reports it, and everything else is a projection from measurements taken before the build.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Building the weekly schedule | 2 hours | 15 minutes |
| Timesheet accuracy without manual review | Required 10+ hrs/week of checking | 95% |
- Up to thirty hours a week projected to come out of scheduling, reporting, admin and communication
- An 80% projected reduction in administrative workload across office and field staff
- An estimated $7,500 a month in revenue protected from missed appointments and communication gaps
- Reporting five times faster through voice, with around 70% of routine queries expected to be handled by the assistant
What has and has not been measured
The $23,400 monthly waste figure was quantified before the build, from scheduling time, timesheet corrections, lost jobs and engineer downtime. Everything under outcomes is a projection rather than a measurement: the platform shipped, staff adoption is reported as fast, and long-term data is still being collected. Nothing here has yet been measured against a post-implementation period.
The client’s name is withheld by agreement. The figures are unaltered.