TW Drainage removes 333 hours of job-related admin each month

Proof of value

Every job that used to take a person 3 to 4 minutes to create is now raised automatically by Build Concierge. At TW Drainage, that removes 250 to 333 hours of manual job-creation admin every month.

Across 5,000 jobs a month, that means 15,000 to 20,000 minutes of manual data entry no longer sits with the back office. Annualised, that is 3,000 to 4,000 hours of admin capacity returned to the business, roughly 1.4 to 1.9 full-time admin roles worth of work.

That capacity gain allowed TW Drainage to absorb its busiest month ever without adding to the office team. Build Concierge did not replace their systems or their people. It just removed the repetitive job-raising admin that was limiting growth.

And these numbers are based on the inbound job-creation workflow alone. That same platform has more recently been extended into TW Drainage's out-of-hours operation, and complex job types across the day-to-day are still being built out: tanker work, repairs, CCTV surveys, burst mains. The hours saved compound from here..

The Challenge

TW Drainage is one of the UK's leading specialist drainage and maintenance providers, delivering reactive and planned services to social housing, local authorities, and commercial clients. From a single founder 18 years ago, the business now runs 50 vehicles, employs 80 staff, and completes around 5,000 jobs every month.

Growth has been organic, client-led, and family-built. Around half the team have been with the business for five years or more.

Volume came faster than the systems behind it. Work orders arrived by email from a long list of clients, each with different formats, different attachments, different SLAs, different job numbering, different POs.

Anthony Hatcher's operations team would open each email, read the PDF, copy and paste the relevant fields, and manually raise each job inside BigChange. Three to four minutes per job. Two hundred and fifty to three hundred jobs a day.

Out-of-hours was the hardest. Between 5pm and 7pm, the phones rang non-stop while the duty team tried to raise jobs manually at the same time. Mistakes were inevitable: wrong job numbers, missed POs, duplicates.

The Solution

TW Drainage already ran on BigChange. Founder Tommy Ward had known Martin Port through the BigChange years and had built up a deep working relationship with that team. When Build Concierge was introduced, the same people who had built BigChange already understood TW Drainage's operation. No explaining the problem from scratch. No retrofitting the integration. The two systems already knew each other.

Setup was light. A meeting or two, permission to connect to BigChange, and the workflows were live. Stacie, Team Leader for Planning, worked directly with the Build Concierge team to define exactly what the workflow needed to extract from each inbound email and where each piece of data needed to land in BigChange. Job number here, PO there, client SLA notes mapped to the right BigChange field. Once configured, the workflow ran itself.

Now, when a client sends a work order, Build Concierge reads the email and any attached PDF, extracts the data, applies the right client-specific rules, and raises a fully structured job in BigChange. What took three to four minutes is now done in around 30 seconds. The same workflow runs out of hours, the moment the email arrives. The duty team focuses on the phone calls. The system handles everything else.

Growth without growing the back office

Tommy Ward admits that he had been holding the business back; the cost of growing the business was too great. To double turnover, he believed he would need to double the office team, and he did not want to put that pressure on the people who had built the business with him. Build Concierge changed everything.

One of the best ways to demonstrate that the platform is doing its job is to look at what hasn't happened. Over the six months since Build Concierge went live, TW Drainage has not made a single new admin hire, despite running its busiest month ever in that period.

The numbers show why: 250 to 333 hours of manual job-creation admin have been removed each month, giving the existing team the capacity to absorb more work without feeling the spike.

There is another benefit too. Clients have noticed the uptick in responsiveness and have stopped chasing. They send a work order, and rather than calling to confirm receipt, they assume Build Concierge has already raised the job. They are right. The phones are quieter, the team is calmer, and the customer experience is better even though the team is the same size.

What's next?

The core day-to-day workflows are doing the heavy lifting. Build Concierge was recently integrated into the out-of-hours operation too, where the phones are at their busiest.

The next phase is the more complex day-to-day job types: tanker work, repairs, CCTV surveys, burst mains. Each has its own client rules and is being mapped one at a time, with Build Concierge and the team iterating together.

Beyond that, the TW Drainage has big plans for the platform. Build Concierge handles more than job creation: automated client updates, portal reporting, SLA management, AI-handled phone calls, omnichannel comms across email, WhatsApp, SMS, and voice. Each of those is a capability the team can switch on as the business is ready.

And on the people side, Tommy is clear about why he is investing. The point of the technology is not to replace the team. It is to make the work easier for the people who built the business.

We don't replace your systems. We make them work properly.

Build Concierge is the AI-powered operations and communications platform for service businesses. We turn emails and calls into jobs automatically, unifying email, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Teams, and Slack, and integrating with the systems your team already uses, including BigChange.