It went live in 2024. Who uses it every day is the part worth reading.
The platform went live in June 2024 and still runs every day. We publish where its use narrowed too, because that taught us more about operations software than the parts that worked.
A binder, a spreadsheet, and the person who remembered
A crawler and heavy-equipment rental and sales business, with an office and a yard in Texas. Parts, purchasing, rentals, equipment records, bills of lading, transport, service and lease agreements all lived in paper forms, spreadsheets, and in the heads of the people who had been there longest.
Steven spent the discovery phase collecting the actual artifacts: the carbon-copy forms, the inventory sheets, the inspection forms. He modeled the system on how the work moved on an ordinary day.
What parts and purchasing did with it
The iPad rollout began in late 2023 and the system went live in June 2024. In the parts and purchasing module, where there was someone who wanted it to work, it did:
Purchase orders and parts records came off carbon-copy forms and onto the system, and they have not gone back. Nearly all of that work now runs through one parts manager. Our read on how much it is used comes straight from the production database's activity log, read in July 2026.
Where no one owned it, use narrowed.
By that July read, day-to-day use had narrowed to essentially one parts manager, working in parts and purchasing. The yard still saved its bills of lading in the system in August 2026. Most of the people who had championed it moved on, and no one inherited the job of making sure it was used.
One share is plainly ours. Service requests were logged from July 2024, but every one stayed at "new", because assigning a crew never worked. That was a defect in our build, and we fixed it in September 2026.
The rest of the gap was in how the engagement was shaped. What the company bought was a build, and builds end. At go-live Steven moved to support, and no one was left driving adoption.
Software fails after go-live, when no one owns it.
That is why our engagements now run past delivery, and why we would rather tell you not to build something than sell you a module no one uses.
The relationship started with a website, and it still has one.
In the summer of 2026 the agency launched the company's new website, with both of us on the team. The client's reply praised the whole team:
Website looks great! … Thank you all for your efforts, expertise, creativity, and patience…
Ask us about this one on a call
We'll tell you what went wrong as readily as what went right. Software that no one owns after launch is one of the most common ways a company wastes money on operations software.