Kerbco · Kerbco + Roadplan · Enquiry-to-permit chain live in 9 weeks; mapping engine replaced the paid licence at week 14
£0 → £50k
NEW PIPELINE BUILT
11 → 1
MANUAL STEPS PER JOB
£16.90 → £0
MAP COST PER JOB
Minutes
ENQUIRY TO PRICED QUOTE
THE CHALLENGE
- Every single enquiry triggered the same eleven-step manual chain: hand-price the crossing, chase the customer for the permit fee, open a Street Manager account, wait on the council reference, request statutory undertaker utility drawings, dig out operative certification, and assemble health and safety, RAMS and reinstatement paperwork by hand.
- The work is unforgiving of incomplete submissions — a missing utility drawing or an out-of-date ticket sends a council application to the back of a four-to-eight week queue, and the customer blames the contractor, not the council.
- Site mapping was bought in at £16.90 per job from a commercial licence, a cost that scaled linearly with every single quote — including the ones that never converted.
- With no admin headcount, the whole chain competed for the same hours as the actual groundworks. Growth was capped not by demand but by how much paperwork one person could physically process.
THE SOLUTION
- One input: the customer completes a single enquiry form. That is now the entire manual data-entry burden for the whole job.
- Kerbco prices the crossing automatically from width, footway build-up and the relevant council fee, and issues a real quote in minutes instead of days.
- Acceptance captures the permit application fee, and payment is the trigger that arms the rest of the chain — nothing waits on someone remembering to chase it.
- A Street Manager record is opened against the job reference and submitted to the council; the returned permit reference lands back on the job automatically, with the council on notice that the application exists.
- The permit reference fires an automatic request for statutory undertaker utility drawings — gas, water, electric and telecoms — so they arrive while the job is still being scheduled rather than the morning the crew turns up.
- Certified operatives are assigned from the platform's credential library, and the health and safety, RAMS and reinstatement pack is generated and attached to the job without anyone opening a filing cabinet.
- Forth built an in-house mapping engine into Kerbco, retiring the £16.90-per-job commercial map licence entirely and taking the marginal mapping cost of a quote to zero.
- Roadplan — Forth's own traffic management tool — stays deliberately manual. The operator places the signage, coning and pedestrian routing by hand, producing both the council submission plan and the crew's on-site sign install sheet from the same drawing.
"I put the job in once. By the time I've made a coffee the quote is out, and once they accept, the permit, the drawings and the paperwork all handle themselves. The only thing I actually draw is the traffic management — and that's the bit that should have a human on it."
OPERATOR QUESTIONS
How this actually works day to day
What does the operator still do by hand?+
Traffic management. Signage, coning and pedestrian routing are drawn manually in Roadplan, producing both the council submission plan and the crew's sign install sheet. Everything else in the eleven-step chain runs automatically.
What triggers the permit chain?+
Payment of the permit application fee. Acceptance of the quote captures the fee, and that payment arms Street Manager submission, the utility drawing requests and the compliance pack — nothing waits on someone remembering to chase.
How are out-of-date operative tickets prevented from reaching a council?+
Operatives are assigned from a credential library with expiry dates. An operative with a lapsed ticket cannot be attached to a submission, which is what stops applications being bounced to the back of a four-to-eight week queue.
Why build a mapping engine instead of paying the licence?+
The £16.90 per-job map cost scaled with every quote, including the ones that never converted. Building mapping into Kerbco took the marginal cost of quoting to zero, which is what made a high-volume lead-magnet model viable.
Does this work outside Scotland?+
Yes. Council fee structures and footway build-up rules are configurable per authority, so the same chain runs UK-wide with local pricing and submission requirements.
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