How it goes today
A family-owned tile and shower repair company of just under 200 people turned its pile of work order PDFs into job records in two minutes. Here is how an order goes missing while it waits, what went wrong for others who automated it, and a build that reads, checks and enters but accepts no job on its own.
On 1 October 2026 the chief technology officer of a family-owned tile and shower repair company, just under 200 people with about 180 technicians, told a trade publication: “The team were really struggling with work order processing, with PDF documents constantly coming in.” Their agent now “reads them, does the duplicate checking and creates the records”. Before it: “waiting one to two business days for us to get to it, then another 10–15 minutes to have it processed”. After: “it's done within two minutes, 24/7”.
Here is how it goes without it. At 4:40pm on a Monday a property manager emails a work order: a leaking shower in a rented unit, with 24 hours to accept. On Tuesday morning, having heard nothing, the manager sends it again with a new tenant phone number. The office is working the inbox oldest first.
On Wednesday at 10:30am a dispatcher types in Monday's PDF. At 11:00am a second dispatcher types in Tuesday's copy as a new job. By then the property manager has given the job to another contractor.
Nobody here is slow. Every order waits its turn in one inbox, and each takes 10 to 15 minutes to type in, so the oldest gets done first and the one with the shortest deadline gets no special place. Property managers' own rules give a contractor 24 hours or less before the job goes elsewhere. At about 750 orders a month, if 1 in 100 goes that way, about $8,300 a month of jobs go to someone else (an estimate, at a typical US regrout of $1,100).
The order, the times and the second copy are an example. The 750 orders a month, the 125 hours, the $1,100 job and the $8,300 are estimates the company's own counts replace.