A land-survey firm running seven tools that never spoke to each other

The firm bids public tenders and runs survey projects end to end, from field work to final report, often with a crew on site and a draughtsperson at the desk. Over the years it had bolted tool onto tool: a practice and accounting system nobody enjoyed using, drafting software, a markup tool, and a long tail of spreadsheets for everything the others did not cover. None of them talked to each other. The same project number, client, and measurement got typed into three or four places, and when two of those places disagreed, no one could say which was right.

Two jobs made it worse. Writing up meeting minutes after every weekly project review ate an afternoon. And field supervision ran on a stack of spreadsheets, one for drawing reviews, one for site notes, one for follow-ups, so the person doing the work spent as much time shuffling files as inspecting. On top of that the firm had no single view of how many projects were live, which stage each was in, or how loaded each lead was. That picture lived in one super-user's head.

We did not replace the practice software the firm had already invested years in. We built a thin layer of small tools on top of it, lowest-hanging fruit first, each one cheap to ship and easy to slot into how people already worked.

The first block was a company dashboard: every project in one view, its stage (study, field, in production, closed), and the current workload per lead, pulled from records that already existed instead of a spreadsheet kept by hand. The second was a minutes assistant: a recorded review meeting comes back as structured, editable minutes in the firm's own format, in the right language, in minutes instead of an afternoon. The third was a set of connectors so the project, field, and accounting records share one identity, the data is entered once at the right spot, and the field-supervision spreadsheets collapse into a single tracked checklist.

The duplicate typing is gone. A project's client, number, and key figures are entered once and read everywhere, so the firm stopped arguing about which spreadsheet held the right number and works from one source instead. Each project lead got back roughly six hours a week that used to go to writing minutes by hand and reconciling files.

The super-user no longer is the dashboard. Anyone can open one view and see how many projects are live, what stage each is in, and who is overloaded, which makes planning a conversation about a screen rather than a memory. Because each piece shipped as a small block in about three weeks, the team kept its appetite and asked for the next one, instead of bracing for one large system that changes everything at once.