Case Study: Modernising a Commercial Flooring Project Management System

The Challenge

Designs4You is a family-run commercial flooring business, managing 350+ jobs per month across maintenance and new projects. The team of 8-9 office staff relied on JobTrackerPro, a legacy project management tool with no API, no integrations, and no path to automation.

The system was no longer fit for purpose. Staff were printing emails, manually inputting every RFQ, updating project statuses by hand, and spending more than 50% of their time on administrative data entry rather than revenue-generating activity. Management wanted to spend more time growing the business, but the operational bottleneck was consuming everyone.

The core problem was not that the team was slow. It was that the tools they depended on made automation impossible. Without API access or modern integrations, every process improvement hit a wall. To unlock any automation, the foundation had to change first.

What We Built

We designed and implemented a complete Airtable workspace to replace JobTrackerPro, purpose-built for Designs4You's specific workflows and ready for AI automation from day one.

The Airtable setup included:

• 4 core tables: Projects, Customers, Fitters, and Activity Log, with interconnected relationships mirroring how the business actually operates
• 7 custom interfaces: Purpose-built dashboards for different team roles, including project detail views, quote pipelines by sales rep, weekly schedules, and ready-to-invoice tracking
• Multiple views per table: Filtered views for specific workflows (e.g., projects by sales rep, by fitter, needs attention, active customers, by region)
• Granular permissions: Role-based access so field engineers, office staff, and management each see what they need
• Team training: Hands-on training sessions with office staff and management to ensure confident adoption

Critically, every design decision was made with future automation in mind. The data structure, field types, and relationships were built so that AI automation could read from, write to, and manage projects programmatically, something that was impossible with the legacy system.

Key Results

Before:

• No API access
• Manual data entry for every project
• 50%+ staff time on admin
• £565/month for 9 users
• 13k contacts in a closed system
• Zero automation capability

After:

• Full API access for automation
• AI-automated project creation
• Significant time freed for growth
• Modern, scalable platform
• Clean, structured data ready for AI
• Foundation for future phases

Why This Matters

Many businesses want to adopt AI automation but find themselves stuck on legacy systems that cannot integrate with modern tools. The instinct is to bolt automation onto what already exists. But when the existing system has no API, no structured data, and no integration capability, the smartest investment is building the right foundation first.

For Designs4You, this system's transformation was not just a tool swap. It was the single step that unlocked every automation that follows. The RFQ processing automation (already live) and future phases covering quoting, project management, and invoicing are only possible because the operational backbone was modernised first.

Client Perspective

"We had been using the same system for years and honestly did not think there was a realistic alternative. Agenticise showed us what was possible, built the whole thing around how we actually work, and trained the team so everyone was comfortable from day one. It has completely changed how we think about our operations."

— Ricky Stoltzman, CEO, Designs4You

Technical Stack

Airtable Team (custom tables, views, interfaces, and permissions), n8n workflow automation (for data migration and future automation phases), Microsoft 365 integration (email and document management), Cloudinary (attachment hosting for automation compatibility).

What Comes Next

With the foundation in place, Designs4You's automation roadmap includes:

• Phase 2: Automated quoting, using project data in Airtable to generate quotes from a standardised pricing engine
• Phase 3: Project management and sign-off automation, streamlining the end-to-end job lifecycle
• Phase 4: Automated invoicing, triggered by project completion in Airtable

Each phase builds on the structured data and integration capability that Phase 1 established. Without this foundation, none of the above would be feasible.