One electrical contractor, and all of its IT
JPI Electrical Ltd. is an industrial electrical contractor doing tower crane inspections, generator maintenance and power factor correction. They came to us for a website. By the end we were looking after everything in the business that has a plug on it.
Where they started
The business had outgrown a directory listing. They wanted a site that explained the work to industrial and commercial buyers and looked as professional as the crews on site, without paying an agency every month to keep it alive. Behind the scenes there was more. The office computers were a mix of whatever had been bought over the years, and nobody was looking after them. Crews filled in paper timesheets. Every crane inspection ended as a form in a filing cabinet, and when a client asked when a crane was last checked someone had to go digging.
The website
We started with the photos. Hundreds of raw shots from job sites, sorted down to the ones worth using, then cropped, straightened and colour corrected one at a time so the finished pages look as good as the work. The site is organised around the services buyers search for, with the credentials and compliance points industrial clients care about near the top. It reads well on a phone in a truck and on a desktop in the office. It loads fast anywhere and there is no monthly hosting bill.
The computers and the email
Once the site was live, the office asked if we could look at the computers too. We rebuilt them on Linux with encrypted disks and locked down accounts, maintained remotely so they stay fast and updated on their own. We took over their email and domain at the same time, sorted out the mailboxes on every device and became the people to call when mail stops flowing. When a strange message lands in someone's inbox now, they send it to us before clicking.
Time and attendance
Paper timesheets were next. We set up TimeTrex on a server we run, configured for their crews, schedules and pay rules, with nightly backups. We trained the office and walked every employee through clocking in, so timesheets and approvals got used from the first pay run. Payroll now comes straight out of the time system.
The inspection app
The last piece was the crane inspections. We built an app that runs on a phone in the field. The forms look like the paper ones, so the inspectors did not have to learn anything new. Required fields cannot be skipped and photos go straight into the record. The inspector signs on screen. A supervisor can see every inspection and who did it, and each one can be turned into a PDF that matches what their clients already expect. The first working version was in their hands the same afternoon we started, and every change since has been tested before it goes live.
Today
Crews clock in and file inspections on their phones. The office can answer "when was this crane last checked" in seconds. The computers stay out of the way. And when anything technical comes up there is one number to call.
We're electricians, not computer people, and Henry has become our IT guy. He built us a crane inspection app in one afternoon and it has saved our crews a pile of paperwork on every job since. He did our website, fixed up our email, got our time tracking onto something we actually own and set up our office computers so they're fast, locked down and we just don't have problems with them anymore. He explains it in plain English and it's done right the first time. If I have a question I usually get an answer the same day. For a shop our size that's the difference between worrying about this stuff and not having to think about it.
Stack
Static website on a CDN, hardened Linux desktops, managed email and DNS, TimeTrex on Linux with nightly backups, inspection app in Next.js and PostgreSQL