An industrial field-services company · Industrial services
A bespoke field-operations platform, from strategy to rollout
Off-the-shelf tools couldn't fit the way this business worked. We advised on the approach, built a bespoke platform, and rolled it out to hundreds of field crews across sites.
- Job admin time
- −60%
- Field adoption
- 94%
- Strategy to launch
- 5 months
The situation
Our client coordinated hundreds of field staff across the country using a patchwork of spreadsheets, a generic scheduling tool and a lot of phone calls. They’d tried off-the-shelf platforms twice. Both times the software forced the business to work the way the tool wanted, not the way the work actually happened — and both times adoption collapsed.
They came to us asking us to build something custom. We started, as we usually do, by asking whether they should.
What we did
Advise. We spent the first weeks understanding how the work really flowed — not how the org chart said it did. We mapped where time was lost, tested a buy-vs-build case honestly, and concluded a bespoke platform was justified, but a narrower one than they’d imagined. Half the features on their wish list turned out to be working around the old tools’ limitations.
Build. We built the platform around the real workflow: scheduling, job management, and a field app that worked offline in places with no signal — a requirement the generic tools had never handled. We shipped in small increments, with field supervisors using each one as it landed.
Implement. We rolled it out region by region, migrated the historical data, integrated it with their existing finance and payroll systems, and trained supervisors to run onboarding themselves. Because real users had shaped it throughout, the rollout met almost no resistance.
The outcome
Administrative time per job fell by around 60 per cent as scheduling, updates and sign-off moved into one place. Adoption reached 94 per cent of field staff within two months of each regional launch — the number that had sunk the previous attempts. From the first strategy session to a live platform took five months.
We continue to support and extend the platform as the business grows.