Industry
Pest Control & Field Services
We spoke with Steyn van Hovell, founder of Pest Control Pattaya, to understand their journey with FieldCamp.
Founded
Acquired 2025
Location
Thailand
Service Type
Commercial B2B
The Company
Pest Control Pattaya, acquired in early 2025, serves commercial clients across Thailand’s bustling urban landscape. Operating in one of Southeast Asia’s most challenging service territories, the company specializes in comprehensive pest management for bars, restaurants, hotels, warehouses, and factories throughout the region. With teams deployed daily across densely populated areas where precision matters, Pest Control Pattaya handles everything from insect control and rodent management to specialized bird nest removal services.
What sets Pest Control Pattaya apart is a strategic focus on commercial operations in a market where traditional pest control methods still dominate. When Steyn acquired the business, there was untapped potential not just in the numbers, but in transforming how pest control services could be delivered in Thailand’s unique urban environment.
The Challenge
When Steyn acquired the pest control business in early 2025, he inherited a patchwork of outdated operational systems that were holding the company back. The previous owners relied on printed invoices, scattered Excel spreadsheets, and Reservio—a restaurant table booking app—to manage field service operations.
The core problems were immediate and critical:
- Impossible route optimization: Teams were navigating Thailand’s complex urban landscape without any intelligent routing, wasting precious time and fuel
- No data visibility: Management had zero insight into where teams were, how long jobs actually took, or which routes made sense
- Language barriers: Thai-speaking technicians in the field couldn’t effectively communicate with English-language management systems
- Address accuracy crisis: In Thailand, standard addresses are virtually useless—GPS coordinates can be off by blocks in densely populated areas
- Manual everything: Scheduling, tracking, and planning required constant human intervention with no automation support
“I wanted to be able to get data on the teams. It’s impossible to manually perfect the route planning… even though we haven’t gotten to full optimization yet, because we have not been able to collect enough data long enough, the idea of having FieldCamp on their mobile apps in the cars means we can schedule and track the teams and hopefully eventually, with the help of AI, optimize those routes, because there’s a lot of time and gasoline saving.”
Founder, Steyn’s Pest Control
The company recognized that traditional field service software wouldn’t solve their unique challenges. They needed something built for the AI era from day one.
The Solution: AI-First Field Service Management
Steyn chose FieldCamp despite it being in beta—a decision driven by one critical insight: retrofitting AI into legacy software rarely works. FieldCamp was building AI capabilities from the ground up, not bolting them onto a decade-old platform.
What made FieldCamp different:
Native multilingual AI communication: Thai technicians could interact with the system in their native language while management received information in English—all through AI translation that didn’t require building separate language versions.
Custom address precision: FieldCamp implemented drag-and-drop pin placement and GPS coordinate capture specifically for Thailand’s challenging addressing system, where standard Google Maps locations are often inaccurate.
AI-powered scheduling suggestions: The system automatically recommends optimal team assignments based on availability, skills, location, and route efficiency—turning a 30-minute manual planning process into a single click.
Conversational interface: Instead of navigating complex menus, users can simply ask the AI to create clients, schedule jobs, or retrieve information in natural language.
But here’s what changed everything for Steyn’s team: FieldCamp wasn’t just digitizing their old process—it was fundamentally reimagining how field service operations could work with AI as the foundation, not an add-on.
The Impact: From Manual Chaos to Intelligent Operations
Operational Transformation
The shift from the company’s previous fragmented system to FieldCamp’s unified platform represented a fundamental change in how the business operates. What once required managing Excel spreadsheets, printed invoices, and a restaurant booking app became centralized in a single intelligent system.
By October 2025, Steyn set a clear deadline: everything had to be fully migrated from the old systems to FieldCamp. This wasn’t just about moving data—it was about changing how the team thinks about field service delivery.
Breaking the Language Barrier
Perhaps the most unexpected transformation came from AI-powered multilingual support. Thai-speaking technicians who previously struggled with English-language software could now interact naturally in their native language. This wasn’t achieved through expensive localization efforts—AI translation happened seamlessly in real-time.
“For my team, especially for those on the road, the technicians, they certainly don’t have a very good understanding of English. So for them to be able to fill in fields in Thai or to use the AI… and they can just communicate in Thai. Yeah, that’s fantastic. If you would have to do that without AI, you’ll be working endlessly with building in translation versions. And with AI in between, we can just basically communicate with each other through the same app.”
Founder, Steyn’s Pest Control
Address Accuracy in Complex Urban Environments
In Thailand’s densely populated areas, where multiple clients might exist within a single apartment building and standard addresses provide virtually no useful location data, FieldCamp’s custom pin-drop feature became mission-critical. Technicians can now precisely mark exact service locations with GPS coordinates or by dragging pins on the map—a feature that emerged directly from early beta feedback.
Building Toward AI-Optimized Routing
While full route optimization is still being developed as FieldCamp collects more operational data, the foundation is already transforming how the team works:
- Data collection infrastructure: Every job, every route, every time duration is now captured and tracked
- Smart scheduling: AI suggests optimal team assignments based on multiple factors—availability, location, skills, and route efficiency
- Future optimization: The accumulated data will enable AI to recommend route improvements, identify time savings, and optimize fuel consumption
“I expect a lot more from it. Especially in the combination with AI and how you guys are building on the ability to ask your AI questions about my data, customer data… I think in three months I would love to do this call again, and then I will have a much better answer to this.”
Founder, Steyn’s Pest Control
Key Benefits
Enhanced Daily Operations
- Eliminated printed invoices and scattered Excel spreadsheets
- Centralized all customer data, scheduling, and job tracking in one platform
- Custom pin-drop addressing solved Thailand’s GPS accuracy challenges
- Mobile apps enable real-time job updates and notes from the field
Operational Improvements
- AI scheduling suggestions reduce planning time from 30 minutes to seconds
- Native multilingual support breaks language barriers between office and field teams
- Sales pipeline and quotation system streamlines customer acquisition
- Real-time tracking provides visibility into team locations and job duration
Better Decision-Making Foundation
- Comprehensive data collection enables future route optimization
- AI-powered insights will identify time and fuel savings opportunities
- Complete job history and duration data supports accurate pricing and scheduling
- Foundation for continuous operational improvement through data analysis
Advice for Pest Control Founders
“Don’t look any further, just use FieldCamp from the beginning. That will save you a lot of time and you won’t have to move over a lot of data later on… I do believe that FieldCamp has a great leverage because it is new and has been looking around and has implemented AI from the beginning.”
Founder, Steyn’s Pest Control
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