Gulf Coast Plumbing Case Study

SUMMARY

Type of Product

Project Management/Payroll System

Business Vertical

Construction

Service

Full-service Development Team—Solutions Architect, Product Manager, UX/UI Designer, Full-stack Developers, Technical Lead, DevOps Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer

Project Duration

October 2021 - Ongoing

Tech Used

Node JS +JavaScript + ReactJS + AWS EKS

Description

A cloud-native web portal for large-scale project management of plumbing and construction jobs, used to track materials used, labor costs, and inventory.

Results

To streamline and improve internal project management workflows, we designed and developed a sophisticated system to track inventory, labor costs, assignments, and change orders across work sites.

THE CLIENT

Gulf Coast Plumbing was founded in July of 1999. In the 18 years since its inception, they have procured, bid, negotiated, designed, value engineered, built and warrantied over 346 projects amounting to well over 72,859 multi-family units. They thrive on fast pace project schedules and excel at designing affordable plumbing systems. They believe that designing a more cost-effective project does not equate to sacrificing quality or efficiency.

THE CHALLENGE

GCP came to us with a specific challenge; they wanted to be able to manage the entirety of their projects from a single application, everything from work site assignments, bids and proposals, inventory tracking, assembly creation, labor costs, and email integration.

To accomplish this, we needed to map out and design a complex and feature-rich user experience, allowing GCP staff to easily navigate between features to manage simultaneous projects.

A sophisticated database structure was also needed to handle the pricing calculations for complex assembly and sub-assembly management at each specific work site. Labor costs also needed to be tracked and associated with each job.

In addition, a scalable architecture was needed to handle the volume of data expected to be ingested by the system.

The Problem

To manage its business more effectively, Gulf Coast Plumbing needed a modern, scalable, and customizable system to handle a growing number of projects. They needed an all-in-one solution to streamline their workflows and reduce the arduous and repetitive tasks plaguing staff daily.

The Solution

Through a series of detailed analysis sessions, we mocked up the core functionality using a beautiful dark theme, suiting the construction space.
Using our tested agile development process, we worked closely with the client to develop each feature before assigning it to them for detailed user acceptance testing. Our team of designers, developers, and product managers worked alongside the client during each sprint to ensure that each feature functioned exactly how it was envisioned.

WHAT WE BUILT

To meet project requirements we built a cloud-native web portal in full-stack Javascript. The entire platform was built on AWS, giving GCP the scalability it needed to add large-scale projects continuously. Additional MS Outlook and FRI integrations are also under development to increase system usability.

The application was built to handle unique assembly structures created at a project level, not only to submit bids for new jobs, but also to track inventory and costing once projects were approved. A change order process was also developed, to handle additional material requests on active projects.

The system allowed for a wide range of customization, giving users the ability to manage employees through a dedicated assignment board, and track labor costs associated with each worksite.

To handle the requirements of each specific work site, our team of engineers designed and developed database schemas to track the advanced inventory and costing structures needed at the individual project level.