EcoDrain Plumbing Services
Melbourne, Australia

In 2021, Joanne Mitsikas and Tim Baxter founded EcoDrain Plumbing Services, a commercial provider based in Melbourne, Australia. What started as a team of two has grown into a full-scale plumbing operation, now serving communities across Victoria. Through constant growth, EcoDrain’s vision has remained the same: to create safe, functional spaces where people can live, work and thrive.

Before Apple, its staff used a mix of personal devices to manage jobs, communicate with clients and handle compliance. Important documents and business data were scattered across devices, blurring the lines between work and personal life. It was hard to control where company data lived and who had access to it. Device management had quickly become a job of its own — costing EcoDrain valuable time and money.

The Apple Business Team helped EcoDrain rebuild their operations, from choosing the right hardware to ongoing support. Today, with Apple Business and MDM, they give every team member a managed iPhone. Each device comes preloaded with the apps plumbers need to access job details, secure access to client information and checklists, plus navigation with Apple Maps. Work orders flow from a central inbox into the Ascora app, syncing instantly on iPhone.

On site, plumbers use camera and Dictation on iPhone to quickly create reports with high-resolution photos and detailed notes. They captured over 9,000 images in the last year. This builds trust with clients, demonstrating service details and compliance standards. And with iCloud and OneDrive, everything is automatically synced from the site to the office, creating instant access to forms, checklists and job histories from any location. So once a job is done, plumbers sign off directly from their device, and the office picks up that info in real time — building a service report and delivering it to the client in under five minutes. End to end, this workflow saves the team over 240 hours each year.

In the office, Jo and Operations Manager, Jess Petersen, switched from PC to Mac. Running the business on MacBook Air, they track progress in real time through Ascora and push urgent updates to plumbers through Messages. And seamless compatibility with third-party apps saves time, as they use Xero for accounting, Urbanise for customer management and OneDrive for file storage — and can stay focused on growing the business.

Apple has helped improve EcoDrain’s safety and compliance too. Processes that took 50 pages of handwritten forms per job are now completed digitally on iPad and iPhone. This saves up to 10 kilograms of paper waste annually. And monthly toolbox safety meetings are recorded on MacBook Air, then transcribed and summarised with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools — cutting administrative workload by over 30 hours a year.

For a small team working around the clock to create safe spaces where people live and work, Apple brings predictability to a reactive business. EcoDrain Plumbing Services is on track to grow to a 15-person team in the next five years, as they expand their reach across Victoria and beyond.