PALA Group, an industrial construction company from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, relied upon off-the-shelf products to facilitate many daily tasks within their business. Most notably, these products were responsible for evaluating new hires, reporting safety conditions, and keeping track of large quantities of rented equipment. However, years of incremental updates strained PALA's workflow until finally one employee's resignation rendered their entire software suite unusable and the data unattainable.

Six months later, Pala contracted Clean Coders to build a custom software solution.

Challenges

Initially, choosing generic products to handle all of PALA's software needs seemed equally obvious and affordable: why reinvent the wheel? However, after years of setbacks accumulated, they came to realize that their needs were not, in fact, generic needs, and that a generic solution was the source of their woes.

For example, despite the rising cost of subscription fees, features dwindled: support expired for the database version they were using, and their account was restricted to a single database. As a result, their software strategy was frozen in time, unable to grow alongside the business's needs.

Furthermore, the initial convenience of ready-made software was undone by the extensive custom macros PALA needed to write to manage this database. These macros worked well enough at first, until a key employee quit without sharing the domain knowledge or passwords necessary to make changes. When updates from Microsoft broke the custom macros, PALA could no longer adapt their code to the new version, rendering years of work unusable. This setback was so devastating that PALA simply could neither use nor access their data for six months. It was at this point that PALA realized a generic solution was ill-fitted to their specific needs.

Our Strategy

PALA contracted Clean Coders to build custom software immune to the pitfalls of their old system. This time around, PALA wanted to own their data, instead of rent it, and decouple their workflow from uncontrollable third-party updates. They also needed software which didn't rest on a single point of failure, or require an in-house expert to operate. Clean Coders promised to meet all of these needs and more through a single, streamlined user interface.

The first step of our plan to liberate PALA was crucial: understand their business, and the industrial construction sector in general. We invested significant effort into learning PALA's processes, workflows, and objectives, and studied how PALA used each app in their software suite to solve problems. Our goal was to learn enough to pass as employees of the company; only then could we be confident that our strategy and implementation would effectively support PALA's business needs.

Each of the three core features they needed required a similar amount of comprehension, which ultimately resulted in a superior solution than any off-the-shelf product could deliver.

Risk Assessment Surveys

One measure PALA took to improve safety on their construction sites was to evaluate applicants with a proprietary survey to test their safety acumen. PALA's original application method required directly editing a Microsoft Access database which, while technically feasible, was a huge risk to the accuracy and integrity of their data.

Clean Coders designed a modern user interface to simultaneously replace and rectify the old system. We improved the user experience for survey-takers, clarifying the question types and streamlining the steps. We automated the data entry task for survey-administrators, removing manual data entry from the process entirely. And, we created comprehensive analytical tools for survey-reviewers, unlocking greater insights into data than ever before.

We also uncovered calculation errors in PALA's previous survey logic, which we corrected in our implementation and revised across all historical data in their database.

Safety Observation Audits

Another requirement of PALA's ethics was routine evaluation of safety measures practiced at construction sites. The original process for conducting this audit was old-school: managers walked the grounds with pen, paper, and clipboard. Back at the office, the same information needed to be entered into yet another off-the-shelf product, duplicating the work required to complete the task. Clean Coders devised a digital method whereby surveys could be both conducted and submitted remotely via tablet, completely eliminating the duplicate data entry step.

In addition to upgrading PALA's safety surveys, Clean Coders added new data visualization features, allowing managers to identify and correct issues at specific job sites or within the company as a whole.

Equipment Rental Management

The third and largest feature we designed for PALA was an equipment rental management system. At any given time, PALA may have had hundreds of items on loan from several possible rental agents, at significant monthly cost. With different rental rules for each item's category at each dealer, keeping track of deadlines and expenses carried great complexity and consequences. Generic software made this herculean task possible, but required an experienced and committed team. However, even with employees inefficiently dedicated to managing their rented equipment, PALA still misplaced (and consequently paid for) many valuable items, including cranes and other vehicles.

Clean Coders consolidated the functionality of the three apps utilized in this tracking process into a single, collected user experience. This new interface relieved the mental burden demanded by the old method, yet did not require its lengthy training or onboarding time. And, with the help of new features, such as equipment history, notifications, and messaging, PALA could save more time and money on rentals than ever. Finally, by reducing the burden of managing the entire equipment rental workflow, rental contracts were not at risk of defaulting due to the resignation of any single person.

Impact

Clean Coders collected these three features into a single web interface written in Clojure, using a Datomic database, and built through the Agile project management method. Our solution was completely covered by unit tests, guaranteeing quality, longevity, and preservation of intended behavior.

Thanks to our efforts, PALA was able to terminate their Microsoft subscription, saving money and protecting their data from breaking, third-party updates. Furthermore, the new system does not depend on PALA's non-technical employees updating its logic through macros, or writing directly to its database.

As a result of our team's extensive research and proactiveness, PALA also scored several bonus features which they did not initially ask for. The app we built could run on any device, empowering workers at construction sites to complete any of its functions remotely. Also, PALA management enjoyed greater insights on data through the customizable charts and reports we built. Finally, equipment rental management gained messaging and chat history features, as well as notifications regarding rental deadlines.

In the end, Clean Coders consolidated an entire suite of software into a single custom software application, bulletproof to employee mismanagement and third party changes, while reducing time and headaches for everyone along the way.