in planned headcount
increase and training costs
4+ hours per day for the construction manager
From start to version 1
implementation
“DC Roofing was about to hire a full-time scheduler, so there’s your return on investment immediately. The longer-term payoff is just as exciting: better communication creates stronger partnerships with contractors and happier customers, and that satisfaction translates directly into valuable word-of-mouth referrals,”
Daniel Clark started DC Roofing Contractors S.A. in 2014 with three employees. Today the business has 36 staff, works with 50+ contractors across a range of trades, and installs 25 to 30 new roofs a week for Adelaide’s major builders and developers, as well as homeowners.
“We’ve got to a point now where we want to lead the industry,” says Daniel. “We believe we’re already better with quality. We want to be better with service too. So, when a customer comes to us, they know exactly what they’re getting and when.”
As DC Roofing’s strategic IT partner, Commuserv had spent two years laying the Microsoft 365 foundations, including migrating email from Google to Microsoft and designing a new multi-site SharePoint structure with matching security groups. The head office runs on a secure network backed by a business-grade firewall, with Commuserv’s support team available at any time.
Roofing runs at the mercy of the weather, and a schedule that’s locked in on Friday afternoon can be out of date by Monday morning. Add installer availability, builder preferences, travel distances and job types, and timelines change constantly.
DC Roofing’s construction manager, Jordan Tilley, was juggling it all on one spreadsheet and a head full of experience.
“When a job moved, I had to manually grab one square and move it to another square, then cross-check that the installers had availability. Moving one job impacted other jobs for months ahead, and every flow-on change had to be made by hand.”
Jordan spent four to five hours a day rescheduling existing work, leaving too little time to schedule new jobs and lead the team.
Job information also lived in monday.com, the team’s project management platform.
“We were double handling data to keep the spreadsheet and monday.com accurate, and the risk was giving builders information that wasn’t right,” says Jordan.
Builders and homeowners weren’t always told when their job moved, so the admin team fielded the calls instead. The bigger problem was that the knowledge behind the schedule had never been written down.
As sales grew, Daniel was close to hiring a fulltime scheduler at $80,000 to $100,000 a year. But Jordan was the only person who could have trained them, and transferring that knowledge would have been near impossible for a fastgrowing business.
Instead of simply digitising what already exists, we look at how the business actually operates, optimise that process and build the technology around it.”
After three years focused on innovation, automation and AI, Commuserv established a business intelligence team to help customers find and eliminate operational bottlenecks.
“Our work always starts with discovery. Before we talk technology, we sit down with a business and work out what’s taking too much of their time,” says Scott Parry, COO at Commuserv.
For DC Roofing that meant mapping how work moved through the whole business, not just the schedule. It showed the real constraint was the knowledge sitting with Jordan.
Commuserv helped DC Roofing use its existing Microsoft 365 investment to build an AI-powered platform connecting people, processes and job data.
Using Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Copilot Cowork, Power Automate and Teams, scheduling and workforce coordination moved from a manual process to a conversational, AI-driven workflow. Staff can ask about and update live jobs in plain language, while automated workflows connect external systems and cut admin.
Scott describes the process in stages:
Daniel and Jordan had already seen the visual model they wanted. Visiting a larger roofing business in Queensland and expecting sophisticated software, they found a whiteboard 10 metres long and 3 metres high, covered in magnets and rewritten by hand each week. It gave the team visibility, but it took four people to keep it up to date.
Commuserv translated that into one live digital board holding every job, installer and change, built on the rules Jordan had carried in his head.
“We’ve rebuilt the entire digital whiteboard so a single change in one system flows through to the other in real time,” says Scott. “It also automatically sends emails and text messages out to contractors, and staff can get to it from a laptop, a phone or a tablet on site.”
The board runs on a screen in the DC Roofing office and across Jordan’s desk, with supervisors and site teams accessing the same information through monday.com. Staff drag and drop jobs, and anything that no longer fits the day moves automatically into the next available slot.
Underneath the board, an editable skills matrix captures what each contractor can do and where they can work, so jobs match the right capability. Microsoft Power Automate turns outgoing quote emails into structured jobs in monday.com and sets up SharePoint folders for each one.
A custom agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio runs in the background, proposing changes and learning the business rules by being corrected when it gets them wrong. Jordan stays in control of every decision as it learns.
"The agent can now reschedule in minutes, but the human in the loop is still the most important part."
“DC Roofing was about to hire a full-time scheduler, so there’s your return on investment immediately. The longer-term payoff is just as exciting: better communication creates stronger partnerships with contractors and happier customers, and that satisfaction translates directly into valuable word-of-mouth referrals.” says Scott.
The office, supervisors and onsite teams now work from the same live picture. Rescheduling a job, or scheduling a new one, takes minutes instead of hours, and because the schedule mirrors automatically, anyone in the office can answer a scheduling question.
When a job moves, the people affected are now told the same day. That matters to a builder waiting on a roof before internal linings can start, and to a homeowner expecting a crew at a certain time.
“The whole point of AI and automation is to get your best people doing work only they can do. Jordan now has hours back in his day to be a construction manager, and to be face to face with his contractors, staff and clients,” says Scott.
“We’ve noticed a difference in Jordan’s mindset too. Before, he was flat out making calls and putting out fires. Now he’s coming up with new ideas about how we can change things and make the business better,” says Daniel.
Scheduling keeps getting sharper as the agent learns the business and the contractor knowledge base grows. Estimating is next, automating the path from enquiry to quote. Beyond that, Copilot Studio provides the foundation for agents that respond to weather events, contractor changes and scheduling conflicts with less manual intervention, along with voice control so field teams can move a job from site.
The longer-term aim is to bring the main daily business activities into one connected system. A monthly block of consulting and development time keeps it all moving.
“In our experience, the day one outcome is not the day 90 outcome,” says Scott. “We don’t implement a solution and walk away. This is a long-term partnership.”
