Acceligent
Meet Mike
Mike is a simple guy. He loves tacos, spends his weekends fishing and works in construction. Mike is a builder and he proud of his work. Every morning, Mike goes to work and creates things, things that sometimes grow high enough to touch the clouds. But Mike doesn’t do it alone. If he’s to be efficient and precise, Mike and his colleagues have to make use of a special tool.
Thousands of moving parts
An active construction site is like an orchestra. In order to finish a project, thousands of moving parts have to work together in harmony. That same construction site can employ dozens, sometimes even hundreds of people like Mike, with thousands of work orders to complete, precise time schedules to follow and incalculable amount of equipment, material and shipments to track. All of this results in huge amounts of data that needs to be managed and used to get everything done quickly and efficiently. If you really think about it, it’s a miracle anything ever gets built.
A construction site's brain
Well, miracle might be a strong word. Acceligent is more like it. They are a US based company selling a solution for time, resource and work management tailor fitted for construction companies - and they are the best in the business. Think of Acceligent as construction site’s brain, holding and managing all key data. Using Acceligent's solution, Mike’s employers can assign tasks to him and his coworkers, track how they are doing and what equipment they are using, all in real time.
What's in it for Mike
Every day, Mike is assigned to a job and a work order by his superiors using the schedule board, a nifty tool that gives a clear, glancable overview of available employees, equipment and most important metrics. It’s best to think of a work order as a daily task for one job. Let’s say that this Thursday Mike got assigned to work on building a house, and his task is installing windows. His colleagues, on the other hand, could be working on other work orders, for instance carpentry or creating roofing. Once they are done for the day, a field report gets filled, putting in the time spent on completing a task. These changes are immediately visible and reviewable, allowing for better next-day scheduling. It’s a win for everyone - Mike always knows what his next task is, and his employer has a real time insight into how far the job has progressed and what is left to be done. End result? Everyone gets to save everyone else’s time and energy, and day-to-day stress becomes a less frequent occurrence.
This is where we come in
If Acceligent's software is the brain, we’re the brains behind the brain. We built the entire thing from scratch, starting with initial brainstorming sessions in which we ironed out the inconsistencies within the idea. With good foundation, development, UX and UI design, as well as QA testing, we managed to deliver this behemoth helping so many people in getting their job done. We had the final say in all technical aspects, and today, we are tasked with incremental upgrades and maintenance of web, iOS and android applications.
What's cool about it
Acceligent's platform is successful because it’s comprehensive. Tracking employees means little without context on what they are actually doing. Tracking equipment means very little without the information on how much it is really being used or how its malfunctions affect the work that is planned planned. We were able to create a truly 360 solution because we were involved from day one, not only as developers, but as consultants and partners. Our main work here was getting a deep understanding of the domain. In order to create an effective solution, we had to understand Mike and get to know what really goes on at a construction site on a daily basis. After that, development was easy.
What Mike doesn't know
So, this is how the whole thing works. In building the solution, we used JavaScript/TypeScript, making the entire development process simple and sustainable. Also, this choice enabled us to share codebase between backend (Node JS), frontend (React) and mobile (React Native), drastically improving the speed of release cycles. For database we opted for PostgreSQL, our go-to solution whenever we need to use a relational database. In order to ensure quick access to all the stored data and have the luxury of using temporary information we used Mongo DB. As Acceligent is also a collaborative tool, we made good use of Sockets to make sure Mike always sees the latest data and doesn’t have to worry about his inputs conflicting with anyone else’s. We used RabbitMQ to make sure all Mike’s notifications are scheduled and timely sent at appropriate times, reminding him of his work schedules, tasks and reporting duties. Tech stack: Typescript, NodeJS, React, Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Socket.io
How effective is the solution?
After implementing the solution, the client did a timing test, measuring how long it took to go through the entire daily work process of one user. On average, they completed tasks 70% faster than they would have without using Acceligent.