Case Study: UtilityVision
Short form
When Redgum arrived, the business was run from the back of a house — fifteen contractors dispatched daily from a whiteboard, each job’s paperwork stuffed into a plastic folder. If the folder went out in a technician’s van, that was the only copy. UtilityVision validates the electrical infrastructure for new suburbs: if they miss an inspection, an entire commissioning can stall, with significant financial consequences. The whiteboard wasn’t a filing system; it was a liability. Twenty years later, it’s still a Redgum client.
The challenge
UtilityVision is a Victoria-based electrical specialist with two distinct arms. The first validates and approves underground electrical systems for new properties and suburbs — legally critical sign-off work that sits on the critical path to commissioning. The second produces CAD drafting for electrical systems across everything from residential builds to large industrial facilities. About fifteen field contractors move across Victoria every day.
When Redgum first came on board — through a referral, almost two decades ago — the question was simple: How do we organise all this paper and this whiteboard?
The whiteboard tracked who was where and on what. Plastic folders were the job management system: the folder’s location in a tray indicated its stage, and if a folder went out with a technician, the office had no copy of it — no specs, no sign-off history, no way to track progress. Invoicing, compliance records, and customer details all lived in paper.
The deeper problem was mathematical. Every additional contractor didn’t add linear complexity — it added exponential complexity to the scheduling, skills-matching, and routing problem. The wrong specialist sent to the wrong side of Victoria. A technician dispatched without the skills a particular job required. The office working flat out just to keep up with the current team, with no margin to grow.
The business had hit a ceiling it could not grow through safely.
What we built
The first thing Redgum built was a digital whiteboard. Just the jobs, who was on what, moveable. Nothing more. The point was to prove the concept before adding complexity — a pattern that has defined every stage of the work since.
Once the team could see the value, the full job details followed. A digital job bag with a complete processing cycle: specs, compliance records, sign-offs, customer information. Enter once; available everywhere. No plastic folders, no missing documents, no reprinting.
From there, the system expanded in deliberate stages.
A calendar integration pushed each technician’s jobs directly to their phone. No need to come into the office to find out what was next.
A mobile application — on each technician’s iPad and iPhone — made every detail of a job available in the field. Technicians could photograph evidence of work done or problems found, replacing handwritten notes with timestamped images. Ad hoc and emergency job dispatch became instant: a new job, pushed straight to the right person, no paperwork involved.
Skills-matching and geographic routing turned the exception management problem on its head. Instead of the office manually checking every job assignment, the system flagged the exceptions — the wrong specialist, the wrong region. Office staff managed edge cases, not every job.
An accounting system integration completed the cycle. Single data entry. No retyping across the job lifecycle.
The build didn’t stop when the system was complete. Mobile phones arrived; the system moved with them. iPads changed what was possible in the field; the system evolved again. Photo capture, GPS, real-time dispatch — each added when the technology matured. The platform has been continuously adapted rather than replaced.
One part of the implementation required more care than the technology. The owner’s wife managed the office and was, in every practical sense, the memory of the business — she knew every job, every client, every moving part. When a system could produce that information in two seconds, it was confronting. Redgum worked with her to find where she could contribute at a higher level, rather than simply replacing the role she had built. She became one of the strongest advocates for the system. That pattern — the person who holds the process in their head is often both the hardest to bring on board and the most important to win over — shows up in almost every implementation of this kind.
The outcome
Error rates dropped significantly. Office headcount held steady as the contractor team scaled. The exponential complexity problem was solved: more contractors didn’t mean more pressure on the office; the system absorbed it.
Technicians stayed in the field longer. Without the need to return to base for paperwork, they completed more jobs per day. Both the inspection and the drafting arms of the business grew.
The liability risk that came with missed or delayed commissioning inspections — the kind that can hold up an entire suburb — was largely removed from the category of human error.
Twenty years on, UtilityVision is still a Redgum client. New capability has been added every year or two, built as the technology to support it became available. A referral that started with a whiteboard and a box of plastic folders has become one of the longest-running client relationships in Redgum’s history.