Van De Velde Schilderwerken is a painting and decorating firm run by the fourth generation of the family. Craftsmanship and word of mouth filled the diary and put several crews out at once. The paperwork never caught up with that growth.

The challenge

Delivery notes, hours worked and costs only came together once the job was finished. That meant owner Yannick only found out afterwards whether a project had made what it should have made. Putting it right while the work was still going on was not an option.

On top of that, a good chunk of every week went on retyping. Each delivery note in the inbox had to be entered and matched to the right job. The crews wrote their hours on paper and somebody copied them into a spreadsheet in the evening. That is not a staffing problem, it is an organisational one.

Our approach

We started from the way the firm already worked rather than from a system everyone would have to learn from scratch. A short workshop to walk through the process, the existing data moved across, and a first working version to react to within weeks.

The foundation is a project overview showing the margin per job, with a traffic light that turns green, amber or red. Around it, two pieces of automation take away most of the manual work. Delivery notes are pulled out of the inbox and matched to the right job on their own. And the crews log their hours by speaking them, in about thirty seconds, in their own language. Not everyone on site speaks Dutch, and a timesheet you cannot read is a timesheet you will not fill in.

The result

The whole project administration now runs in one place. Where hours used to go into notes, timesheets and margin overviews every week, what is left is roughly half an hour, spread over a short daily check. The margin is visible while the job is running, so it can be corrected before it is too late.

More telling still: all of it is genuinely used, voice logging included. With this kind of project, that is far from a given.

Where it goes from here

"We come from a traditional, non-technical world and were a long way from digitalisation and AI. With their guidance we did take that step," Yannick says. Since launch we have stayed on for hosting and support, and we keep building as the business grows.