With a small back office and 16+ airports to support, Australian Airport Services used Tugger and Claude to take hours of weekly Simpro admin off the team's plate.
Australian Airport Services keeps ground support equipment serviceable at more than 16 airports. Beau Berg used Tugger® to structure the company’s Simpro® data for Claude, so the admin that used to eat hours each week ran on its own.
Australian Airport Services keeps aircraft moving from the ground up. GSE maintenance and hire for major airlines and ground handlers, across more than 16 airports nationwide, run out of four bases in Cairns, Townsville, Darwin and Canberra.
Belt loaders, ground power units, air start units, aircraft stairs, cargo loaders, pushback and baggage tractors, plus tailored airport solutions on top. If it moves an aircraft or its cargo, AAS keeps it serviceable. Twenty years in the industry, and still growing.
Beau Berg is Operations Manager, which puts him between the customer’s operational requirements and what AAS has to deliver against them. The core of the job is keeping the ground support equipment safe, compliant and serviceable, so nothing stops on the apron.
To coordinate all that, Beau had Simpro, Google Sheets, Tugger and Claude working together. Jobs organised, tasks completed, KPIs communicated, operational data pulled out in a shape the team could actually use.
That’s what the customer reports and the spending trends were built on.
AAS runs a small administration team. That’s deliberate, and it’s also the constraint. Periodic batch invoices, customer spending trends, GSE reports. All of it regular, all of it necessary, and all of it the same shape every time.
Producing that detail meant going hunting. Finding the information, then cross-referencing it across Simpro and Google Sheets, over and over.
Several hours, every week, on work that never changed.
For a business chasing bigger contracts, that’s the wrong kind of growth. More jobs means more invoices and more reports, and normally that means more people to produce them.
“Batch invoicing and reporting used to eat hours of admin time each week, chasing details back and forth between Simpro and our spreadsheets. Now it runs on its own, and because Tugger guides the AI to the right figures, I can trust what comes out.”
The batch invoicing was the clearest example. Beau didn’t ask the AI to work it out from scratch. He built it a route to the right answer, then let it run.
The old way. Find the jobs. Pull the detail out of Simpro. Cross-reference it against the spreadsheets. Assemble the batch by hand. Several hours, every week.
The project. Beau set up a project in Claude for the invoicing run, so the same instructions applied every time it fired.
The skill. He gave it a dedicated skill, setting out how AAS put a batch invoice together and which figures it needed to do it.
The data. Tugger structured the AAS data and pointed the AI at the right figures, instead of leaving it to interpret raw exports.
The run. The batch generated automatically. Beau checked the output rather than building it.
Every week, spent building batch invoices by hand.
Airports supported nationwide, from four bases.
In aviation ground support, and still growing.
The platforms AAS runs are adding AI of their own, and they’re good at what they’re built for. Ask a job management system about jobs and it’ll tell you about jobs. That’s exactly what it should do.
Tugger’s doing a different job. It joins up what’s spread across systems, so the business can interrogate itself as a whole rather than one platform at a time.
That’s an executive view rather than an operational one. It was the view Beau needed when he was reporting to a customer on their spend, or working out where a trend was actually coming from.
Ask one system, and you get one system’s answer. The business is bigger than that.
Then there’s control. Tugger is modular, so Beau mixed and matched which platforms fed his AI and reporting tools. Not only what AAS was running then, but whatever came next.
That last part mattered more than it sounds. New platforms and new AI tools are landing at pace. Being able to plug the next one in, without rebuilding what sits underneath, is what makes any of this worth building on.
As productivity and accuracy improved, growth got a lot more realistic. The team could take on more work without a matching increase in administration and management overheads.
Beau was clear about what the reclaimed hours were for.
“That’s time we can put straight back into planning our expansion.”
Streamlined and precise, an AI-enabled company with a small back office gained the edge it needed to compete with the larger GSE providers.
Bring your systems and a question, and we’ll show you what your own data can tell you on a call.
Jeff Smith used to spend weeks pulling one piece of analysis together. Now he asks Claude, through Tugger, and his Simpro and Xero data answers back.
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Andrew Maclaren isn't a developer, but he's got AI building Noosa Electric's weekly Simpro and Xero reports overnight, and two hours of his Monday morning back.
Don't just take our word for it.
Every Monday I used to spend two hours running reports through Simpro and Xero. Now AI queries my Tugger database overnight, and the spreadsheet is waiting for me, with a couple of years of history in it. I’ve got my Monday morning back.
It’s helped me keep my finger on the pulse of each department without having to be down in the trenches to get that pulse.
Before Tugger, our reporting was fragmented. Our data lacked clarity. Tugger changed all of that, giving us unified, visually engaging reports across all areas of our business, making data insights much easier to understand and act on.
Before Tugger, every data question came to me. With our Simpro and Xero data connected to Claude through Tugger, people ask their own questions now, and they help each other too. I am no longer a bottleneck around data.
