Four OEM portals and a spreadsheet, replaced by a single normalised fleet record and an offline-first app in every cab.
Client
A civil earthmoving contractor
Industry
Earthmoving & heavy plant
Duration
20 weeks + run
Team
2 senior · 2 mid · 1 data · 1 SRE
Stack
Flutter · Go · Postgres · Timescale · GCP
Engagement
Dedicated team
The situation
Four OEM telematics portals, three unit systems and one supervisor logging into all of them every morning to build a spreadsheet by hand. Nothing reconciled against what the business had actually invoiced.
Prestart inspections and defect reports left the gate on paper. When an incident was investigated, the paperwork was in a glovebox.
Constraints we worked inside
Connectivity
No usable signal at three of eleven sites for most of a shift. Anything an operator touches has to work fully offline.
Mixed fleet
Four OEMs exposing hours, fuel and position differently, and disagreeing on what an engine hour is.
Hardware
Ruggedised tablets on 4G, gloves-on operation, and screens read in direct sun.
Safety
Prestart and defect records had to satisfy the plant record-keeping rules in the client’s jurisdiction from day one.
Architecture
four OEM adapters behind one normalised machine record
Clients
Edge
Ingest
Services
Data
Decisions & tradeoffs
Decision 01
Every OEM quirk is absorbed in its own adapter and never leaks past it. Adding a fifth OEM is now a two-week job instead of a refactor.
TradeoffAn adapter layer to maintain, and a normalisation spec to keep honest.
Decision 02
A shift produces work the server has never seen. We defined precedence rules with the client’s safety team first, then built to them.
TradeoffSlower start; the first eight weeks produced very little anyone could see.
Decision 03
Asking operators to log idle time would have produced compliant, useless data. We inferred it from engine and hydraulic signals instead.
TradeoffPer-model calibration for each machine class in the first quarter.
What we’d do differently
We built the supervisor web board before the operator app. Supervisors were the buyer, but operators were the ones who had to adopt it — and adoption was what the whole business case rested on. We would build for the cab first now.
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