Property inspections, Canberra.

The problem

A thirty-five person inspection business was coordinating its entire operation by hand. Scheduling inspectors, capturing what they found on site, producing the report, then raising the invoice.

Each of those steps worked. The cost was in the joins between them. The same information was entered to book the job, entered again to write the report, and entered a third time to bill for it.

At that headcount, a few minutes of re-keying per job is not a few minutes. It is thousands of hours a year, and it scales directly with how much work the business wins. Growth made it worse.

What I built

A custom inspection portal, with automated report generation, wired into the scheduling and invoicing systems that already existed.

No off-the-shelf product fitted. The business had its own inspection types, its own report formats and its own obligations about what had to appear in them. Buying a generic field service tool would have meant changing the business to suit the software.

So the job is booked once. The inspector captures findings against that job. The report generates from what was captured. The invoice draws on the same record. Information is entered where it originates and never typed again.

The result

Around $250,000 in annual cost saving, and more than 8,000 hours a year returned to the team.

The hours figure is the one worth sitting with. Eight thousand hours across thirty-five people is a meaningful share of their working year, recovered from work that produced nothing.