We were not the original developers of this project when it began in 2015. However, we played a central role in designing and defining the platform’s feature set from 2014-2019. In 2019, we officially inherited full responsibility for the project and have since maintained and expanded its capabilities continuously. Our entry into the software development field began in 2014, and we’ve been building on its core features ever since.

The Challenge

• Around 2008, a LAMP stack application was developed by the company internally to serve as a sales CRM and project management platform for a construction company. Over time, the codebase became increasingly unmanageable—cluttered with spaghetti code due to a revolving door of entry-level developers maintaining it internally. Eventually, a professional software development company was brought in to perform a complete rewrite of the system.

The Solution

• The system was designed around a clear set of goals, the foremost being the elimination of duplicate data entry. In major construction, a project moves through many distinct phases—starting as a sales lead, then progressing to an active bid, an awarded project, or even a multi-phase contract tracked across several internal numbers. The core design principle was that each project should exist as a single record, serving as the source of truth throughout its entire lifecycle. Rather than spinning up new records across disconnected systems (forcing users to follow a trail of breadcrumbs), all relevant data would be appended to the existing project record as it matured.
• Legacy project data would be imported and mapped into this unified structure, preserving the complete history and associated metadata. This ensured that the sales and forecasting tools had full visibility into both active and historical project data.
• One critical application of this architecture was in supporting prequalification (prequal) efforts. In construction, the prequal process is used by general contractors or project owners to evaluate and approve subcontractors before allowing them to bid on a project. It requires a well-documented history of past work, categorized by scope, size, and other attributes. The system made it easy for the sales team to locate relevant project history and compile prequal documentation quickly and accurately.
• Once a project moved into the execution phase, the platform captured all required job-specific information—such as the assigned project manager, assistants with access permissions, editable field controls, and trade-specific roles. For each trade involved, the system supported scoped checkboxes, dropdowns, and logic-based inputs to capture job complexity and trigger downstream processes.
• Ultimately, all this data flowed into a comprehensive forecasting interface—a spreadsheet-style dashboard used by the labor planning team to forecast field labor demand across all ongoing and upcoming jobs.

Results & Growth

• The MVP was delivered over the course of 6–7 months. From that point forward, all cloud-based solutions at the company relied on this system as the backbone for bid and project data. Its centralized architecture enabled the development of numerous workflows that significantly increased the number of projects each Project Management team could handle.
• The system eliminated duplicate data entry and stopped bad data at the source, ensuring clean, structured input throughout. With a clear chain of custody, every project record included a full history of job phases and granular permissions for who could edit what, and when, during each phase.
• The result was a high-integrity, high-efficiency system that has had a major impact on the company’s bottom line—through improved operational efficiency, cleaner data, and scalable project oversight.