The Challenge

• The Director of Operations at a construction company approached us with a major workforce tracking issue. With over 700 field workers, they relied on a full-time employee whose sole job was to call around daily or weekly to find out who was working where. As you can imagine, it was an operational nightmare.
• There are several critical reasons to track field personnel: not everyone is issued a company phone—only Superintendents, Foremen, and select Journeymen typically are—so visibility is limited. Management needs to ensure workers are on the right job sites and understand the reporting structure—who is working under whom.
• In a large construction company with multiple departments, this becomes even more complex. An employee might be assigned to the Major Construction department one week and then shift to the Tenant Improvement or Retrofit department the next. Superintendents need to stay in close communication to coordinate labor needs and adjust daily as project demands shift.

The Solution

• We built a user interface for the Operations Department and Superintendents that provided full visibility into which field employees were assigned to whom at any given time. To avoid duplicate data entry, the system integrated directly with the company’s accounting platform to retrieve employee names and relevant details.
• Once an employee was set up by HR and Accounting, their name would automatically appear in the system, ready for assignment.
• Because the data came from the accounting system—the company’s source of truth—it included key metadata such as union affiliation and role hierarchy (e.g., first-year apprentice, third-year apprentice, Foreman, or Superintendent). This saved the Operations team considerable time and reduced the risk of missing or incorrect information.
• Employees were assigned to a Superintendent and then to a Foreman under that Superintendent. When Foremen had workers reporting to them, they were designated as “Crew Leaders.”
• Superintendents also had the ability to reassign employees from another Superintendent’s crew into their own labor pool. When this occurred, an automatic email notification was sent to the affected Superintendent to ensure transparency.
• Additional metadata, such as vacation or sick leave status, was tracked to give management an accurate view of workforce availability.
• Since the accounting system was only accessible on the corporate network, we designed a secure cloud-based solution that synced data to an external platform. This cloud system was hosted on a hardened VPS and protected by a secure firewall, enabling access outside the corporate building without compromising security.

Results & Growth

• This system became the foundational source of truth for the broader cloud-based platform we eventually built for the entire company. Many downstream solutions depended on it to function properly.
• The immediate impact was significant: it eliminated the need for a full-time employee to manually track workforce assignments and enabled Superintendents to self-manage labor scheduling more effectively. This freed up valuable time for higher-level operational tasks.
• Over time, the system supported a shift toward decentralized labor management. The central operations department was eventually phased out, with labor oversight transitioned to individual project management departments. Because the tools were built to support this level of flexibility, the company was able to streamline operations in alignment with evolving business needs.
• The initial release of the system was completed in approximately 3–4 weeks. Additional features and enhancements were introduced over time as new projects were built to interface with it.