Northwind field operations app
An offline-first mobile app for 400 field technicians working in places with no signal and no patience for spinners.
The problem
Northwind's technicians worked in basements, tunnels and rural sites where connectivity was unreliable at best. The existing web app assumed a network connection and lost work whenever that assumption failed.
Technicians had stopped trusting it and reverted to paper, which meant data arrived days late and often not at all.
What we did
We built offline-first from the first commit. Every action writes to a local store and syncs opportunistically, with conflict resolution that favours the technician's most recent input and flags genuine conflicts for a supervisor.
The interface was designed for one thumb, in gloves, in bad light. We tested it on the cheapest Android device in the fleet rather than the newest.
The outcome
Paper fell out of the workflow within six weeks. Job completion data now arrives in near real time instead of days later.
Support tickets about lost work went to zero and stayed there.
Our technicians had given up on the old app and gone back to paper. Six weeks after launch the paper was gone. That is the whole review, really.
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