The challenge
A utilities contractor ran 340 field engineers on paper job sheets, photographed and emailed at the end of each shift, then keyed into the back office by an admin team the following morning. Job data was a day old by the time it reached anyone who could act on it, and disputed work was difficult to evidence.
A previous attempt at a mobile app had been abandoned after six months because it required connectivity and a substantial share of jobs took place in basements, rural sites and underground chambers where there was none.
What we did
- 01
Offline-first as the architecture, not a feature
A local database holds the engineer's full job set and all reference data. Every action writes locally first and queues for sync, so the app behaves identically whether or not there is a connection.
- 02
A conflict policy defined per entity
Field-level merge for job notes, last-write-wins for status where safe, and explicit resolution for anything that affects billing — written down and tested rather than left to the sync layer to guess.
- 03
Designed for gloved hands in poor light
Large targets, high contrast, minimal text entry, and photo and signature capture optimised for one-handed use — validated with engineers on site rather than in an office.
- 04
Integrated with the back office
Two-way sync with the existing job management system through an anti-corruption layer, so the legacy schema stayed contained and the app was not constrained by it.
- 05
Rolled out in waves with field champions
Three regional waves, each with engineers from the previous wave supporting the next — which produced substantially better adoption than the previous top-down attempt.
The outcome
Admin time per job fell 52%, and job data now reaches the back office within minutes of completion rather than the following morning. Photographic and signature evidence attached at the point of work has materially reduced disputed jobs.
Sync success on reconnection sits at 99.4%, with the remainder surfaced to a support queue rather than lost. Adoption reached 96% of engineers within eight weeks of the final rollout wave.