Acme Prism
7-app suite I led for a Pacific Northwest land surveying firm. Unified 5 departments, saved about $500K a year, cut cycle times 13%.
Client name changed for confidentiality.
5 departments, each with workarounds
A self-taught coder held the whole system together with band-aids, toothpicks, and glue. Impressive, but the team had hit the ceiling.
Five tools or one with room to flex
Building per-department apps means five sources of truth and a leadership team that can't see across them.
One database. Branches where the work demanded it.
Parent-child relationships that let broad processes get specific only where the work needed them to.
7 apps over 4 years, $500K saved annually
Desktop scheduler, mobile field portal, per-role dashboards, customized Zoho and QuickBooks, a unified database underneath.
When I joined this Pacific Northwest land surveying firm in 2017, they had an internal system that I'll call "The Bridge." Surprisingly functional, honestly. Visually... rough. It was built by a technical person who taught themselves to code and held the whole thing together with band-aids, toothpicks, and glue. Impressive. But it was built in silos, one piece at a time, while the business kept running around it. Five departments, each with their own workarounds and frustrations and bottlenecks.
I spent the first weeks shadowing crews, sitting with coordinators, and pulling the COO into the same room as field leads. Same conclusion every time. The system worked. The people around it had learned how to make it work. But it had a ceiling, and everyone had hit it.
One database. Branches where the work demanded it.
Five departments made five separate tools feel obvious. That would have created five sources of truth and no shared view of the business.
So the call was the opposite. One database, with parent-child relationships that let broad processes get more specific only where the work demanded it. Same language across departments, same data points, same definition of what a job is and where it's at. Enough flex that crews didn't lose the operational details that made their day work.
"It's powerful to have a tool like this, but it feels like we've hit a ceiling with how it's put together. Too many workarounds, too many fields, too many places to look."
"I'm excited to see how you can unlock the potential of all of our internal knowledge and skills. We have guys here that learned from their Dad and their Dad's Dad."
Stakeholder interviews, Week 1Event storm structure
Actors
Scheduling, field crews, department leads
Events
Job created, crew assigned, field work completed
Commands
Schedule, update scope, send requirements
Policies
Department-specific requirements branch from one job record
The board stays as the desktop proof; mobile gets the same workflow shape in an inspectable format.
What the workflow looks like
The unified shape, before any UI.
Event Storm of the scheduling workflow. Actors, events, commands, policies, mapped across departments so the parent-child cuts could be deliberate instead of accidents of UI.
Seven apps. One database. Four years.
The rebuild took about four years and ended up as a 7-app suite. A custom desktop scheduler with drag-and-drop and integrated ArcGIS mapping. A mobile field portal for surveyors with GPS, offline capability, and time tracking. Customizable per-role dashboards with the metrics and queues each role lived in. Customized Zoho and QuickBooks for analytics and accounting. A revamped database and reporting layer underneath it all.
Every app pulled from and wrote back to the same source. Different surface, same definitions. A job ID in the scheduler was the same job ID in the field portal was the same job ID on the dashboard was the same revenue line in QuickBooks. That part is boring to describe and load-bearing for everything.
Four surfaces, one database
Where the unification shows up.
Scheduler, map, dashboard, and the mobile field portal. Drag, scroll, or use the arrow keys. Same data underneath each one.
The full mock suite is live at prism-suite.vercel.app. Same login across the desktop scheduler, map, dashboard, and field portal. Open the live suite to see the same job data across all four.
One small example of how the parent-child setup paid off. Field crews kept returning to sites because something specific to a department's workflow hadn't made it to the truck. I added a pre-leave checklist to the field portal that pulled site-specific requirements straight from the job record. Mandatory fields where they had to be mandatory, optional where they could be. Same UI for every crew. Different content per job type. Return visits dropped about 10% month over month after launch.
The cross-department work doesn't show up in the metrics. It's what made the software stick.
I kept meeting with the five department heads after launch. New services and edge cases kept appearing, and the shared workflow had to absorb them without splitting back into five systems.
Same structure, same language, same data points across departments, with room for each team to run efficiently. Without that work, people would have invented new workarounds, dirty data would have piled up in the database, and the analytics would have grown blind spots. The architecture only stayed unified because someone kept showing up to keep it that way.
By the end, the work was saving about $500K a year. Cycle times dropped 13%. Field crew go-backs dropped 10%. Operations finally had a clear picture of what was happening across the business in any given week.
Planning and prioritization were most of the work. With contracted devs at high hourly rates, every poorly scoped sprint burned money fast. Code keeps getting faster. Choosing what to build, in what order, and where to stop still takes 70 to 80% of the effort.