← Case studies · AI audit · Construction & trades · 14 days
A piping contractor burning 144 hours a week on hand work, worth $164,295 a year
waste priced, per year
largest single leak
of busywork, every week
“We've had projects with about 1,400, 2,000 isometrics, and we've had two people running through that for, like, three weeks just doing up our take-off.”
A commercial and industrial piping contractor. They fabricate and install high-purity, high-pressure stainless steel pipework for big infrastructure jobs: water and wastewater plants, oil and gas, defence fuels, pharmaceutical, industrial gases. Owner-led, grown from one project at a time in 2018 to 60 to 70 staff across five sites in several states, and about to tip over 100 if they win the next major job. Every job is fixed price, so the estimate has to be right or the money is simply gone.
A single project can carry thousands of isometric drawings that someone counts by hand, weld by weld, fitting by fitting, before any price goes on. Their tools did not talk to each other, so spreadsheets and manual copying held the gaps together, and every won tender got rebuilt from scratch in the job-management system. To be fair, they were not standing still. The lead estimator had rigged up his own AI tool to read drawings, and the owner had built an earn-versus-burn tracker by hand so he could see mid-job whether the team was bleeding hours. His own verdict on it: very manual, very accurate.
Findings & waste analysis
Commercial piping and mechanical contractor · audited July 2026
- One full-time person doing nothing but manual equipment tracking and condition reports$98,800/yr
- Reviewing timesheets across 70-plus workers, back and forth on errors$19,500/yr
- A project manager checking every line of every supplier quote against the take-off$10,000/yr
- Two senior people peer-reviewing each tender estimate before it goes out$9,620/yr
- Two people sitting together for about two days to configure each new job$9,600/yr
- Counting a large take-off by hand runs two people about three weeks, every job. Held out of the annual figure on purpose3 wks/job
figures verbatim, in the client’s own rates · names removed
The audit surfaced 145 findings across 11 areas of the business, with tendering and estimating alone carrying 61 of them. The quantified slice came to $164,295 a year and 144 hours a week. One full-time person did nothing but manual equipment tracking and condition reports. Timesheets for 70-plus workers went back and forth on errors. And the biggest cost sat outside the annual figure on purpose: counting a large take-off by hand runs two people about three weeks per job. That is a per-job burst, not a weekly cost, so it was held out of the headline rather than inflated into it.
Free 30 min · one process priced live, like the lines above
How it ran before
- One full-time person doing nothing but manual equipment tracking and condition reports
- Reviewing timesheets across 70-plus workers, back and forth on errors
- A project manager checking every line of every supplier quote against the take-off
The blueprint we handed over
- reads the drawings with AI so the take-off stops being two people counting welds for three weeks, then checks the numbers a second way, because accuracy is the whole game.
- auto-compares tender drawings against construction drawings so nobody redoes the entire take-off from scratch.
- builds each won job in the job-management system from a template instead of from zero, cross-checks supplier quotes against the bill of materials automatically, and links progress on site to hours burned, so earn-versus-burn is live rather than a spreadsheet the owner updates by hand.
This audit's findings, laid out as the client received them, names removed. The full deliverable maps every process, prices every leak, and ends in a build plan in priority order.
Walk through a full sample audit →Kickoff
Team sessions, every handoff mapped
Every leak priced in their rates
Findings + blueprint, live
“The trend was that we were burning more hours than we were earning. We were bleeding, man.”
None of this was visible from the owner’s chair.
Found by mapping the operation person by person, and pricing what came up. Same method, your rates: 3× the fee in findings, or the audit is free.