Applied Blockchain leverages Claude to save £250K a year in project budget overruns

Applied Blockchain has spent over a decade designing, building and supporting 150+ platforms for clients including Shell, DHL and the United Nations, with teams in London and Porto. Every engagement starts with a proposal and runs against an agreed scope, budget and timeline.

Before offering AI consultancy and delivery to clients through Applied Edge, Applied Blockchain fundamentally transformed how its own business operates. The team rebuilt the project lifecycle around a single record of each client's requirements and estimates, which Claude keeps up to date from calls, emails and meeting notes, from the first proposal through to the final invoice.

Results with Applied Edge:

• ~£250K a year in project budget overruns removed, with no overrun since
• Proposals produced in 3 hours instead of 3 days
• One record of requirements and estimates per client, kept current by Claude across every call, email and meeting
• Progress tracked in Jira and GitHub against the agreed baseline, with days worked flowing into timesheets and invoices

The challenge

Keeping proposals, delivery and budgets working from the same record

Applied Blockchain's proposal and delivery teams had worked from separate sets of requirements and estimates. A proposal captured what had been agreed at the start, while delivery worked from its own understanding of the scope as the project moved on.

Scope changes arrived through calls and emails, and they were hard to track against the original budget. By the time a change showed up in the numbers, the work had often already been done. Across the business, overruns cost around £250K a year.

For a company that asks clients to trust it with complex, regulated platforms, that gap mattered. Applied Blockchain holds itself to delivering what it has agreed, at the price it has agreed, and wanted every team to be able to see the same picture at any point in a project.

The solution

Delivery powered by Claude, shaped by a decade of enterprise engineering

The team rebuilt the project lifecycle around one source of truth for each client, using engineering and delivery patterns drawn from over a decade of running projects for regulated organisations. Claude does the work of keeping that record current, so nobody has to reconcile notes from different teams by hand. This is not something you get from adding a general-purpose AI tool to an existing process.

• A single record of requirements and estimates. Claude updates each client's record from calls, emails and meeting notes, so scope changes are captured as they happen rather than reconstructed later.

• Proposals from the record. Proposals come straight from that record, which is how a three-day task became a three-hour one.

• Delivery tracked against the baseline. Once a client signs off, Claude tracks progress in Jira and GitHub against the agreed baseline, flags delays and scope changes as they arise, and feeds days worked into timesheets and invoices.

Every project now runs from proposal to invoice on one record that the proposal, delivery and finance teams all share.

Why it matters

Clients get proposals faster and projects that stay within the scope and budget they agreed. The standard Applied Blockchain set for itself, delivering what it promised at the price it promised, now holds across every project, and the team's time goes into delivery rather than reconciliation. Applied Edge brings the same approach to teams running complex programmes, whether internal or client-facing.