SPB Utility Services

Daniel Peterson, founder of SPB Utility Services, faced a predicament most growing businesses know well: he’d outgrown his tools, but hadn’t yet scaled into the enterprise ones built to replace them.

SPB manages water and wastewater utilities across roughly 70 locations in northern Nevada with a team of about 15 people. Field operators were spending too much time on lengthy, open-ended work orders that were difficult to navigate and easy to abandon mid-fill. Without native filtering, operators had to sift through hundreds of open work orders across all sites just to find their assignments — causing jobs to slip and time wasted on rework. Backlogs grew and incomplete entries became the norm. For Daniel, keeping up meant hours of manual, tedious editing each week, touching work orders one by one.

“The tools we were using previously were great products but they weren’t worth the money,” said Daniel. “At our size, we didn’t use most of the functionality that they offered, so it was either overpay to over-engineer, go back to more rigid project management tools, or build something myself. I chose the latter.”

He came to SimplaDocs with a clear goal: build an application that could support SPB’s operations today and grow with the business tomorrow.

After hearing Daniel’s vision and understanding SPB’s current state, SimplaDocs created a two-phase process. First: get the work order system under control. Second: build a leadership operating system bespoke to SPB’s way of working that would support its growth.

Phase one started by mapping the user journey for the field operations team. Through user interviews with SPB team members, SimplaDocs understood what wasn’t working and developed a plan to streamline the process — adding easy-to-set recurring tasks and intuitive filtering that saved operators time placing work orders and gave them full transparency into their day’s assignments. Within two weeks of developing the app, SimplaDocs had completed onboarding and launched SPB’s new system to all field operators’ iPads.

Next, the team built the tools Daniel needed to manage his business strategically. Bulk editing work orders — previously hours of tedious manual updating each week — was replaced by a web of automations that let him update hundreds of work orders across all of northern Nevada in minutes.

One of the most impactful moments came when Daniel used AI to mock up his ideal dashboard. “I spent at least 10 hours one weekend creating the perfect dashboard for our new work order management system,” he said. After walking the team through how he wanted to engage with it, they brought it to life in Coda — fully functional and connected to his live data.