A field-to-office project management system built in Rails that connected crews, assets, and management dashboards — reducing reporting time by 40% and eliminating paper-based workflows entirely.
A mid-sized US construction company managing 12 concurrent sites was running operations across a patchwork of spreadsheets, WhatsApp group chats, and physical sign-in sheets. Project managers had no real-time visibility into labor hours, equipment locations, or material usage. Reports were compiled manually each Friday — a 6-hour process per site manager.
They needed a unified platform that field workers could use on-site (low connectivity included) and that gave management instant visibility into project health without requiring a change in how their crews fundamentally operated.
We chose a Rails monolith over microservices deliberately — the team had no DevOps resources, and a well-structured monolith on AWS would be far more maintainable. The field PWA syncs via a REST API with optimistic local storage, flushing to the server when connectivity restored.
The most technically complex feature was the offline-capable field PWA. Construction sites often have poor connectivity, so we implemented a service worker with IndexedDB queuing — field workers can check in, log hours, and upload photos offline; everything syncs automatically once connectivity is restored, with conflict resolution handled server-side.
Geofence validation runs both client-side (for immediate UX feedback) and server-side (for audit integrity). Workers outside a 150m radius of a job site receive a prompt; admins see an exception flag in the dashboard.
| Layer | Technology | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Backend | Ruby on Rails 7 (API mode) | Core business logic, REST API |
| Frontend Field | Progressive Web App (Vanilla JS) | Offline-capable field UI |
| Admin UI | Retool + Rails views | Management dashboards |
| Database | PostgreSQL on AWS RDS Multi-AZ | Primary data store, HA |
| Search | ElasticSearch | Full-text search across projects, workers |
| Storage | AWS S3 + CloudFront | Photo/doc storage with CDN |
| Background Jobs | Sidekiq + Redis | Report generation, notifications |
| Real-time | ActionCable (WebSockets) | Live dashboard updates |
| Deployment | Docker + Capistrano + EC2 | Zero-downtime deploys |
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