Case study, 2024 to ongoing
Utilita Energy
A maintenance platform we built together to replace the spreadsheets and bloated enterprise tools the team had been working around, giving them something practical, purpose-built around their operations, and genuinely used by the people who needed it.
Utilita Energy needed a better way of managing the contractor site permits running across their estate. The process they had at the time was very manual and very paper-heavy, with contractors requesting permits offline, the Utilita team chasing missing information through email, and everything ultimately living in inboxes and filing cabinets.
They came to me to design and build a Laravel-based web application that would move the entire process online and give them a single source of truth for permits, contractors and approvals.
The core problem they had was incomplete permit requests causing constant back-and-forth delays. Contractors would submit requests without all the necessary documentation in place, which stalled Utilita's approval process and tied up the team in admin work that nobody really wanted to be doing.
What they needed was a system that quietly enforced completeness up front, kept a clear audit trail running through everything, and took the administrative overhead of chasing paperwork off the team's plate, all without forcing the contractors to learn yet another bloated portal interface.
I built a permit-management system in Laravel that walks contractors through the full application process step by step, gently requiring all the necessary information before a request can actually be submitted for approval. The contractor side of the application is built with Livewire to handle the interactive multi-step flow without needing a separate front-end framework.
On the back end, Utilita's team review, approve and reject permits through a clean Filament admin interface that's been tailored to the way the team actually works day to day, rather than being a generic CRUD shell. Permissions, contractors, sites and historic records all sit together in one place.
The trickiest part of the whole build was generating the permit PDFs directly from Utilita's existing templates, and then integrating e-signature functionality so that the entire approval process, from initial application through to final sign-off, happens within the one system.
10,000+
Jobs scheduled · 3 years in production · Laravel + Filament
- Contractors can now apply for permits from anywhere, without any paperwork involved.
- Utilita receive complete applications first time around, which has eliminated the constant chasing for missing information.
- Every permit is stored digitally with a full audit trail running underneath it.
- The manual processing time has dropped significantly across the whole team.
In their words
“Dan understood the operational reality of what we needed, not just the spec. The result is a tool the team actually uses every day, and that’s rare.”
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