Precision Utilities Group retires paper, recovers $250,000 a year, and reinvents field operations with Zoho Creator

The company

Precision Utilities Group, Inc. is a telephony and wireless telecommunications service provider founded in 2009 with one ambition: to be "not the average contracting company." Its senior leadership team, made up of former telephony executives who had previously been customers of contracting companies, brought with them more than 200 years of combined industry experience and a clear sense of what worked and what didn't.

Today, the company offers a full spectrum of services, including wireless construction, outside plant work, central office installation, directional boring, buried drops, project management, and engineering, with state managers overseeing technician quality across each region.

The challenge

For over a decade, Precision Utilities Group ran almost entirely on paper. Every one of the 15,000 drop orders was printed out and walked through the full job lifecycle of locates, installation, and billing on a single sheet marked up in the margins with notes, ticket numbers, and updates. If that sheet was misplaced, the order was effectively gone. Every three months, the team ran a manual reconciliation called a "find-a-ticket" exercise just to confirm no paperwork had slipped through the cracks.

The downstream impact of this process reached every department. Field technicians wrote completions on payroll sheets that didn't always capture every billable activity, leading to missed revenue. Office staff lost their mornings transcribing the previous day's paperwork. Orders sometimes weren't closed until noon. Damage claims required cross-departmental hunts to piece together the original ticket, work performed, and payout history. Subcontractors manually created invoices for every job they completed.

The solution

After seeing their paper-based workflow firsthand, a contact introduced Kim to Clean Community Inc., a Zoho Partner. Within the first demo, it was clear Creator could be the foundation for something far more ambitious than a digital order log. Working closely with the Clean Community team, they built a custom field operations management application that now covers every corner of the business.

Operations dashboard

This is the central command center. Live panels categorize jobs as past due, due today, or projected out over the next three days, each with click-through drill-downs. A weekly open jobs view gives supervisors visibility into labor distribution Monday through Sunday.

Work order management and quality control

Every order flows through three phases: routing and assignment, workflow updates, and quality control. Field crews close out orders in real time from their phones, with prompts that surface every billable add-on and capture revenue that previously slipped through the cracks.

Damage claims dashboard

This replaces the multi-department paper trail with a single workflow moving claims from inspector assignment through payment. Accounting, supervisors, and field teams now collaborate inside one record, with the full audit history attached.

Traccar fleet integration

This provides real-time GPS tracking and telemetry for every company vehicle. Managers can see when a technician left home, where they stopped, and when they ended their day. The owners credit this visibility with reshaping crew accountability.

Locates dashboard

Built for high-stakes compliance, this module tracks every utility locate against its expiration window, with critical-tier alerts for tickets expiring today or tomorrow and dedicated Ohio and Indiana views.

Precision-view subcontractor portal

This partner-facing dashboard lets external crews see only the work assigned to them, drill into job statuses, and submit completions. The portal also includes reverse invoicing, where the system generates the subcontractor's invoice automatically.

Financial operations and billing

This centralizes subcontractor management, GL mapping, cost approvals, and rate cards. An automated invoice engine and a drop production revenue graph give finance real-time visibility into billing performance.

Benefits and ROI

The shift from paper to platform produced measurable returns within months of go-live. The impact reached every layer of the business, from supply costs and back-office workflows to billing cycles, field operations, and team productivity.

• $250,000+ in annual operational savings: By automating manual data entry, paper handling, and reconciliation work, freeing the team to focus on higher-value tasks.
• 90% reduction in paper consumption: From 20 cases per month down to roughly 2, with corresponding savings on ink and printer replacement.
• Four hours reclaimed every morning: Orders close in real time from the field rather than being transcribed from paper the next day.
• 16–24 hours of weekly billing entry eliminated: By feeding completed orders directly into the billing workflow for verification.
• Improved field crew accountability: GPS tracking gives supervisors live visibility into daily activity in the field.

Looking ahead

With the core operations app stabilized and adopted across every department, Kim's roadmap is focused on retiring the last paper processes still floating around the office. Top of the list is a digital expense management module, where employees can snap a photo of a receipt and have it auto-populate an expense form she can review and approve from the same dashboard she already uses for contracts.

A vehicle safety inspection module is next, replacing the daily paper checklists for headlights, brake lights, and other vehicle checks that pile up unread on supervisors' desks. For Kim, the case for continued investment is straightforward.