The work was fast. The paperwork was not.
A hazardous materials and environmental emergency response company, working out of East Texas. Crews who could be on a roadside within hours, and a billing cycle that waited days on a drive back to a filing cabinet.
What it looked like before
The operational record lived in Microsoft Access databases and on paper. Crews were dispatched through an off-the-shelf paging app that could alert a responder but capture nothing at all about what happened next.
So everything that happened at a scene came back to the office on paper and was re-keyed by hand. The job was done, the customer was taken care of, and the invoice sat waiting on someone's drive back to a desk. The people were quick; the paperwork held them up.
What Steven built
One system on three surfaces: iOS, Android and the web. The two mobile apps wrap the web application, so one codebase serves all three. It was delivered in phases, and the third, in 2022, ran on a standing review every two weeks. The first iOS release went to the App Store in September 2020; Android followed in 2022.
- Dispatch with push notifications to responders, and live job status from the field
- GPS and location tracking, with photographs captured at the scene
- Incident reporting written from the mobile app rather than from a desk
- A public intake form for brokers that opened a tracked incident with a reference
- A web incident manager, a document vault with a written operating manual, response summary reports and incident search
- Manpower records, collections contacts and billing
- User registration and two-factor authentication
It was wired into the systems the business already ran on (a CRM, the accounting platform and their Microsoft tenancy) and moved onto a dedicated server as the load grew.
It became how the company talked about its own work.
The system generated a job number in a particular format. After a while that format started turning up as the subject line of emails their own staff wrote to each other. No one instructed them to do that. They needed a way to refer to a job, the system had handed them one, and it quietly became the company's shorthand.
No one measured that. We noticed it in their email, and we count it as the best sign the system had taken hold.
Then the owner asked a question he could not have asked before.
In April 2022, about nineteen months after the first App Store release, he asked whether the incidents now held as data, plus four to five years of history from the old paging app, could be used to predict call probability by geography, by day of week, and by time of day.
We're not sure he noticed he had crossed a line just by asking. That is not a question you can ask when your record lives in a filing cabinet. The system had stopped being somewhere to put information and become something the business could think with.
Nearly seven years, start to handover
The relationship started in December 2018 as a WordPress migration Steven did through an agency. In 2023 the agency handed the company to us as a direct client, under a signed referral agreement between us. In 2025 the company brought its software in-house, and we ran the handover through the July cutover.
We have deliberately not named this company or published what the work cost, and we will not until they tell us in writing that we can.