A client sent Network Power Connections a bill for several thousand pounds. The claim: NPC’s crew had damaged a car park during a recent installation. They faced potential charges for an unwarranted claim they knew wasn’t their fault.
Jon Miles, Operations Director at NPC, pulled up CompanyCam. He sent the pre-start photographs — timestamped and GPS tagged — taken before a single tool had been lifted on that project. The proof was in the photos. Satisfied this was not the result of NPC’s work, the client dropped the bill.
“If you catch a couple of those in a year,” Jon says, “you’ve earned your money back. And then the rest of it is a bonus.”
In a sector where disputes can spiral into delayed projects and lost trust, being able to show your work, not just claim it, is how you protect your whole operation; from your crew, to your reputation, and your clients.
That moment didn’t just save NPC money. It signaled to Jon that the way his team documented their work had fundamentally changed — and that the change was worth building on.
A Growing Business With a Documentation Problem
Network Power Connections is a UK-based electrical infrastructure company. Its crews build electrical infrastructure for EV charging, hospitals, fire stations, high rise apartments, schools and much more across the country — regulated, complex work, where the evidence trail isn’t optional.
Jon Miles joined as Operations Director with 35 people on the books and a management problem that’s familiar to anyone running a trades business at that size. Not a staffing problem, not a quality problem, but an information problem. Multiple crews and sites, and no reliable way to know what was actually happening across any of them without picking up the phone or driving out there yourself.
It’s a challenge that compounds as a business grows. At 5 people, the owner knows everything because they’re everywhere. At 35 people, with crews running simultaneously across different sites, that becomes unrealistic. The question isn’t whether your team is doing good work. It’s whether you’d know if they weren’t.
“One thing I very quickly picked up on was the delay between getting that information from the site and having that back in our office to act upon.”
When You Can’t See What’s Happening On Site
The transformation CompanyCam brought to NPC wasn’t just about tidier photo folders. It was about giving Jon and NPC’s two directors something they’d never had before: the ability to run a 35-person business across multiple live sites without being physically present on any of them. Now, from a single screen, they have a real-time view across every active project. Not a summary from yesterday’s check-in, but what’s happening right now, today, this morning.
“Rather than having to go around five to ten project managers and discuss on their terms what’s happening with their projects, from a senior leadership point of view, we’ve got a real-time overview. What’s happening today, who’s been doing what, where has the team been.”
For Jon, that visibility changed how he manages and acts on information. Issues that would previously have been buried in a WhatsApp thread are now spotted and corrected the same day: a trench depth slightly off, a joint in the wrong position, a material that needs replacing before backfill covers it.
Visibility isn’t an operational perk, it’s how you manage a growing business without losing control of it.
The Back-and-Forth That Eats Project Managers’ Days
For a project manager running those sites day-to-day, the impact is just as tangible. Multiply that across five project managers each running several jobs at once, and the numbers add up quickly—site visits have halved, and time that used to disappear into travel now stays in the business.
“There’s been a couple of occasions where we’ve changed the path of some jobs because of what we’re seeing coming through. Little things that potentially a project manager with five or six simultaneous projects on may have missed. We’re seeing that and changing course at that point, rather than it becoming a problem.”
That same principle applies to how corrective actions get managed. When an independent distribution network operator (IDNO) audits an installation and raises a non-conformance, often trivial like resealing a GRP, but nevertheless needing correction, the old process looked like this: a chain of WhatsApp messages to the operative on site, a handful of photos sent back of varying relevance, someone in the office writing up a report manually, and the whole thing landing with the IDNO days later.
Now, the corrective action is raised, assigned to the operative via a CompanyCam checklist, completed on site with photo evidence attached, and a branded NPC report is generated and sent back to the IDNO the same day: “It’s just the click of a few buttons. We’ve created a professional-looking report that clearly states what the corrective action required, here’s the evidence of what we’ve done and how we’ve done it — and there’s an NPC-branded PDF that we can attach to the email and send straight back.”
Documentation That Shows the Quality of the Work
There’s a quieter benefit to all of this that Jon comes back to more than once: professionalism.
The checklist function has created momentum within NPC’s project management team. What started as ad-hoc task lists has become the foundation for something more structured — ISO-compliant managed checklists for specific task types, built into templates so that every project starts with the right documentation ready to go. It’s a work in progress, but the buy-in is already there.
“The project managers are buying into the fact that we can develop this and make it better.”
NPC works for clients — DNOs, IDNOs, and commercial operators — who expect documented, evidenced delivery as standard. The ability to produce a clean, branded report from site photos and checklists isn’t just an internal efficiency. It’s how NPC communicates the quality of their work to the people procuring it.
“Internally, I feel a lot more professional about our delivery of photos to the client.”
For a business taking on larger, more regulated contracts, that shift matters. It’s not enough to do good work. You have to be able to show it.
Building for What Comes Next
The direction is clear. CompanyCam has become the operational backbone of how NPC manages site progress — real-time evidence gathering, in one place, accessible to everyone who needs it.
“CompanyCam is the tool for how we manage site progress and projects. It has a massive part to play in that process — document, control, and evidence.”
And for anyone still weighing up whether it’s worth the time to get started, Jon’s answer is straightforward: “They need to give it a go. The time they invest in it now will definitely save them time in the future.”
