Two apps built with AI. Next, one company app with quoting inside.

What does Kalpumps do?

Kalpumps sells, repairs and services pumps, mostly for mining customers. It supplies slurry pumps, underground dewatering packages and parts, and both its Perth and Kalgoorlie branches have full service capability, with 415 and 1000 volt test facilities.

What sets the business apart, as Ben tells it, is covering both ends of a pump's life. Plenty of suppliers either sell new pumps or repair old ones. Kalpumps does both, from the first sale through servicing and on to the end of an asset's life. A team of around 18 runs it, and the company says its people bring more than 120 years of combined experience with mining pumps in WA.

Where does the time go?

Into paperwork. When Ben took on the business in March 2026, much of it still ran on paper. By his own estimate about 30% of his week goes on quoting, and the rest is scattered across people management, budget tracking and the weekly sales reports.

Those reports show the path he is on. They started on paper, moved to Excel, and are now moving to Claude, so other people can enter their numbers and a finished report comes out the other end.

Why is quoting the hard part?

Because the big quotes live on paper and in a few people's heads. For a large pump package, the person quoting works from a pile of paperwork, adds it all up and types a short quote in Word with a single price on it.

In Ben's words, "they'll literally have a stack of paper on their desk, and then they'll just add everything up." That works until the customer comes back. If they want to go ahead, or change a few items, and the person who wrote the quote is away, there is no line-by-line breakdown to adjust.

It is also a question of who can quote at all. The knowledge behind the largest packages is concentrated in a few people, Ben included. His question was a fair one: what happens to a customer waiting on a quote when he takes two weeks off? It is the same problem we see in most businesses that quote by hand.

What has Ben already built with AI?

Two web apps and a quoting spreadsheet, all built with Claude. In earlier one-on-one sessions he built a tracker for service jobs and a contact tracker for the external sales team. He has also built an Excel quoting template.

• A service job tracker, so every job that arrives in the service workshop gets attention when it should. Before it, jobs could sit on the shelf and be forgotten until the customer chased them.
• A customer contact tracker for the external sales team. The reps log their contact with each company, and Ben can see which customers nobody has reached out to, and where the team is strong or weak. The sales team has started using it.
• An Excel quoting template that breaks a package down page by page and rolls it up to one price on the front page. It works well for Ben, and he wants to refine it so others can use it too.

What he did not have yet was a way to bring the apps together into one system the whole team can sign in to.

What is he building at our AI workshop?

One company app. The plan is to bring the service job tracker and the sales tracker into a single app, add quoting to it using the template he has already built, keep everything in a proper database, and give staff their own sign-in.

That is the plan agreed on his strategy call, and for now it is still a plan. Ben's place is booked at our one-day AI workshop in Perth on Thursday 24 September 2026. People bring their own work to the day and build on it, with help in the room. Once quoting is in, the idea is to keep adding to the same app, starting with people management, so it becomes the one place the team works from.

Why does this matter for Kalpumps?

Capacity. Work is coming to the business that the team does not have the time to take on, and every hour that goes into paperwork is an hour not spent on growth.

Ben's aim is to take that load off, so quoting does not depend on one or two people and his own time can go into growing the business rather than keeping up with it.