How Lagan Aviation Centralized Infrastructure Forecasting Across Four Business Units in a Single Hub

How Lagan Aviation Centralized Infrastructure Forecasting Across Four Business Units into a Single Hub

Challenge

Lagan manages a high-value project portfolio across four specialist business units. Before this engagement, every unit ran its own disconnected Excel spreadsheets. Leadership had no real-time view of the portfolio, no standardized stage structures, and no structured link between clients, contacts, and projects.

The cost was measurable: 3–5 hours per board cycle assembling reports manually, no cross-unit performance view, and no foundation for multi-year planning.

The challenge was not simply technical. Lagan wanted one purpose-built, multi-hub CRM that matched how they already worked, not a system they would need to adapt to

Solution

INSIDEA’s strategy was depth over breadth: one hub, configured precisely to Lagan’s operational reality:

Fig. 2: Custom Quarterly Forecasting Properties in HubSpot

3. A custom Breeze AI assistant for executive reporting. INSIDEA configured a Lagan Executive Pipeline AI Assistant using HubSpot Breeze, structured specifically around the four business units. Leadership now generates board-level summaries from live CRM data in under 30 seconds using natural-language prompts: total pipeline value, secured versus future work, regional performance, multi-year forecast outlooks, stalled opportunities, and delivery risk.

The full build included four dedicated pipelines (each with its own stage structure and regional segmentation), five executive dashboards, a client-to-project association architecture for portfolio-level visibility, and a pipeline upgrade coordinated with HubSpot support to enable the multi-pipeline architecture on Sales Hub Professional.

Results

In 83 days, 232+ project opportunities moved from four disconnected spreadsheets into a single live HubSpot environment. For a project-led business, the pipeline is the business. Every opportunity in a fragmented spreadsheet was a decision made with incomplete information.

Four dedicated pipelines mean operational reality and commercial oversight now live in the same place for the first time. Always-current dashboards replaced manual assembly: directors are no longer reviewing history; they are reviewing the present.

One result fell outside the original scope. The Breeze Executive Pipeline AI assistant, delivered as part of the standard rollout, not a separate project, reduced board reporting preparation from three to five hours to a thirty-second natural-language query against live data.

The adoption outcome is the clearest validation. Directors who began as Excel-only users adopted HubSpot immediately, with no parallel spreadsheet use observed after launch. Its absence reflects an implementation built around how Lagan works, not how a generic CRM expects a business to work.

Impact “INSIDEA understood that we were not looking for a traditional sales CRM. The implementation focused on operational forecasting, project visibility, and long-term infrastructure planning while keeping the platform simple and practical for leadership teams to use.” -- James Crawford, Lagan Aviation & Infrastructure

Short-Term Impact: The First 90 Days

From day one, HubSpot replaced spreadsheets as the primary forecasting tool across all four business units, and the Breeze assistant immediately handled executive queries that had previously required hours of manual work. Two verified 5-star reviews on HubSpot Solutions Directory, and G2 followed in May 2026

Long-Term Impact: A Foundation Built To Scale

Lagan now has a CRM foundation that grows with them. The four-pipeline architecture supports new business-unit expansion without rearchitecture, and directors who once opened Excel to run a board meeting now open HubSpot.

The partnership with INSIDEA continues. The next wave is already scoped: AI-generated board summaries, stage-triggered task automation, predictive workload forecasting, mobile rollout with SSO integration, and scheduled executive reporting digests. INSIDEA’s ongoing role is to ensure the system grows with Lagan, and that the team continues to get more from what they already have.

How Did AI Contribute to the Outcome?

AI was embedded in both the delivery and the outcome. HubSpot Breeze powers the Executive Pipeline Assistant, turning 3–5 hours of manual board preparation into a 30-second query against live data. Breeze Record Summaries gave directors instant project-level intelligence from day one. On the delivery side, Claude and ChatGPT accelerated schema design, pipeline configuration, and dashboard build, recovering approximately 5 hours with no rework. This shows how AI made human intervention quicker and improved the output.

Verified Client Reviews From This Engagement