An offline-capable app for your field staff

Your technicians, drivers, or inspectors work out of the office all day. What they note on the road only reaches the office in the evening: on a work order with a coffee stain, in a photo through WhatsApp, or in a voice message someone has to listen to. A colleague then retypes it into the planning or the accounting system. Between the work and the invoice sit two days and at least one error.

When a mobile app really helps

Not every process needs an app. Someone behind a desk is better off with a web application on a large screen. An app on the phone is useful when the work happens outside and hands are often full. Think of a technician who completes an installation and has the client sign on the screen, a driver who takes a photo of the delivery at each stop, or an inspector who runs through a checklist and sends the report right away. The camera, the location, and the signature are already in the device. We make sure they land in your process.

So we do not start with the app, but with the work. We ride along for a morning or walk the floor and look at what someone now writes down, photographs, or simply remembers. That is the list of what the app has to do. Often it is shorter than you think: three screens that are exactly right are worth more than twenty nobody opens.

Works offline on site

Reception is not a given. In a technical room, a parking garage, or a warehouse with steel walls, the connection drops, and an app that shows an error message then is no longer opened after a week. We build the app so that it keeps working without a connection. Completed forms, photos, and signatures stay on the device and go to your systems automatically as soon as there is reception again. The employee notices nothing, except that it simply works.

That requires a few deliberate choices: which data the app fetches in advance, what happens when two people edit the same work order, and how the office sees what has not been sent yet. We make those choices during the prototype, together with the people who will soon have the app in their pocket.

One app for iPhone and Android

Your team does not all have the same device, and you do not want to pay twice for the same app. We build one codebase that runs on iPhone and Android and looks natural on both. Where possible, we choose a web app you install without an app store. That saves review rounds at Apple and Google and is often enough for an internal app. If you need the scanner, camera, or location features that only a native app offers, we build those and guide the publication in the stores.

Within ten business days, a first version is on the phones of two or three employees. They use it in real work, with real clients and real work orders. What chafes, we adjust before the whole crew switches over. If an online store or a portal for your clients turns out to be the better solution, we tell you right away and look at Apps and online stores or Client and self-service portals.

Connected to your back office and owned by you

An app that keeps its data in its own bucket only moves the retyping. The work order a technician closes has to be in Exact or AFAS as a draft invoice that same afternoon, and the hours have to end up in the planning. We arrange that through System integration, so the app and your systems use the same data and there is one version of the truth.

You are the owner of the app, the source code, and the data. The servers the app talks to are in the EU, and the processing follows the GDPR, including for the photos and locations the app records. Every year, new versions of iOS and Android come out, and an app has to keep up with them. You can do that yourself, or you leave it to us through Software maintenance.