Before
Jobs and time were tracked on paper and in spreadsheets. Nobody had one live view of what stage a job was in or who was on it. Someone had to walk the floor and ask, or wait for a sheet to be typed up later.
An earlier tablet app had been tried and retired. It didn’t fit how the floor really worked.
What I built
Three pieces, each doing one job:
- A shared database holds the jobs, stages and bunks, with a record of every change.
- A small server keeps the keys off the tablets and makes sure a retry never makes a duplicate.
- A tablet app installs like a normal app, works with no wifi, and catches up when the wifi comes back.
What changed
The floor has one shared view of every job, instead of a walk and ask. A bad wifi day no longer costs data: everything waits on the tablet and syncs when the connection is back.
Built with- Airtable
- Cloudflare Worker
- PWA
Before and after
Read next- Crew logged bunks on paper; the office retyped it.→Tablets at every station, one live board.
- "What's on hand?" meant a walk to the shelf.→Live stock counts, right on the tablet.
- Written formulas that didn't agree with each other.→One set of formulas on the tablet, math done.
- Every wifi blip looked like an outage.→A dropped connection just catches up.
Station 3 tabletdrawing
Wifi dropped. 3 updates waiting on this tablet.
Back online. All caught up ✓
When the tablets kept freezing, it was fixed the same day
One slow request was holding up every tablet. A time limit on every request fixed it.
