AI Adoption · Case Study · 2026

How Oakdene Construction Compares Supplier Prices and Cuts Office Admin

Comparing supplier prices, catching pricing anomalies and using Claude Enterprise to reduce office admin, from routine email replies to the everyday tasks that pile up around procurement.

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Client Context

A construction company was losing hours every week to supplier quotes, invoices and inbox admin.

Oakdene Construction is a UK building and construction company whose office team was spending a significant part of every week on manual, repetitive work: comparing quotes and invoices from multiple suppliers line by line, checking whether prices had crept up between orders, and working through an inbox of routine supplier and client emails that all needed a reply before anyone could move on to anything else.

None of this was unusual for a construction business of Oakdene's size. Materials get ordered from a rotating list of suppliers, quoted prices vary between orders and sites, and someone in the office has to notice when a price has moved, whether that is a genuine cost increase or a mistake worth querying, before an invoice gets paid. That checking work is easy to describe and tedious to actually do at volume, which is exactly the kind of task that tends to get done quickly rather than done carefully.

Oakdene brought INTAI in to set up Claude Enterprise across the office, with a specific, practical brief: use it to compare supplier prices properly, surface anything that looked like a pricing anomaly, and take as much of the routine admin and email load off the team as it could safely handle.

01 · Comparing Supplier Prices Properly, Not Just Quickly

Checking supplier prices by eye does not scale much past a handful of suppliers.

Before this engagement, comparing supplier prices at Oakdene meant someone in the office pulling up quotes and invoices side by side, often in different formats and layouts from each supplier, and working through them manually to see whether a price looked right. It is a job that is straightforward in principle and slow and error-prone in practice, especially across a full week of orders rather than one or two at a time.

Claude Enterprise was set up to take in supplier quotes and invoices as they arrived and lay them out for direct comparison, by supplier, by material and over time, so a price that had moved was visible immediately rather than something someone had to notice by memory or by chance. The office team still makes the call on anything that looks off; the system's job is making sure that call gets the chance to be made in the first place.

That distinction matters: this was not set up to approve or query pricing on its own. It surfaces the comparison and flags what looks unusual; a person in the office decides what to do about it.

02 · Picking Out Pricing Anomalies Before They Become Overpayments

An anomaly caught before an invoice is paid is a saving; one caught after is a dispute.

The more valuable part of the comparison work is catching the pricing anomaly nobody was specifically looking for: a delivery charge that has quietly doubled, a unit price that does not match what was quoted, a supplier charging Oakdene a different rate on the same material than the previous month. These are easy to miss one invoice at a time and easy to spot once invoices are laid against each other and checked consistently.

Once flagged, these go back to the office team to query with the supplier directly, before payment rather than after. Catching a pricing anomaly before an invoice is paid is a straightforward correction; catching it afterwards means a credit note, a phone call, and often a supplier that assumed nobody was checking.

03 · Admin, Email and the Rest of the Day

Supplier pricing was only part of what was eating into the working week.

Alongside the supplier work, Claude Enterprise was also set up to handle a good share of Oakdene's routine office admin: drafting and, where appropriate, sending replies to standard email enquiries, from suppliers confirming delivery dates to routine client questions that come up on most jobs, plus the smaller repetitive tasks, chasing outstanding paperwork, logging order confirmations and keeping records up to date, that had previously been squeezed in between everything else.

None of this is unique to construction. HeyBRB's UK Admin Drain Report, based on a March 2026 survey of UK small business owners, found that respondents were losing an average of around eight hours a week to repetitive admin, the equivalent of roughly ten working weeks a year, and that 83% had never actually worked out what that time was costing the business. Oakdene's experience was consistent with that pattern: the admin was rarely urgent on any single day, which is exactly why it kept accumulating.

Freeing up that time did not mean removing the office team from the loop. Routine, low-risk replies go out with oversight built in; anything that needs judgement, a pricing decision, an unusual request, a client complaint, still lands with a person to handle directly.

04 · What This Means for Other Building and Construction Firms

The same admin load sits behind most small and mid-sized construction businesses, not just Oakdene's.

Supplier price comparison is worth automating before it is worth worrying about. Most construction businesses do not have a pricing anomaly problem so much as a nobody-has-time-to-check problem; solving the second tends to solve the first.

Keep the decision with a person; let the system do the comparison. Claude Enterprise was set up to surface anomalies and draft responses, not to approve payments or commit to anything on Oakdene's behalf. The office team stayed the decision-maker throughout.

Admin debt is invisible until someone adds it up. The HeyBRB survey's own finding, that 83% of small business owners had never calculated the cost of their admin time, matches what Oakdene's team said before this engagement: the time was going somewhere, but nobody had actually totalled it.

Start with the tasks that are already well understood. Comparing quotes, checking invoices and answering routine emails are jobs every construction office already knows how to do; the opportunity was in doing them consistently at volume, not in doing something new.

Conclusion

Nothing about the work changed; how much of it landed on a person did.

Oakdene Construction did not change how it buys materials, chooses suppliers or answers client emails. What changed is how much of that work still requires someone in the office to sit down and do it line by line. Supplier prices get compared consistently, anomalies get flagged before an invoice is paid rather than after, and a meaningful share of routine email and admin now gets handled without waiting for a free moment that rarely came.

For a construction business of Oakdene's size, that is less about a single dramatic saving and more about the accumulated hours it no longer takes to keep supplier pricing honest and the inbox under control, time the office team can put back into the jobs actually in front of them.

References & Sources

The wider admin burden behind this case study.

Figures on UK small business admin burden are attributed to their originating source below.

HeyBRB. UK Admin Drain Report 2026. March 2026.

Referenced for the finding that UK small business owners lose an average of around eight hours a week, roughly ten working weeks a year, to repetitive admin, and that 83% have never calculated what that time costs the business.

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This case study describes INTAI's engagement with Oakdene Construction, a UK building and construction company, and reflects the approach and outcomes reported by the client for the work covered here. The external statistic referenced above is attributed to its originating source and reflects that publication's own reporting period. This case study is provided for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal or financial advice.

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