Keeping the taps running with a custom SaaS

Large organizations have a set way of doing things – implementing changes can be tough. With over 3000 employees, La Metro, Grenoble’s metropolitan authority, had several organizational bottlenecks.

One such bottleneck was prominent in the water department. Hugo Bonomi, the department’s team leader, said they had an immediate need to track daily operations among field inspectors.

At Tinkso, we bring enterprise-scale apps and tools to life through the power of Bubble and No-Code. With our help, La Metro was able to deploy its tracking solution in just 6 weeks. Since then, we’ve collaborated on several other projects to help them increase internal efficiency.

But first, let’s go back to when it all started.

Digitizing field inspection for 300 employees

If you can believe it, only a few short years ago, La Metro’s operation tracking and management processes centered “mainly around paper and pen.”

To fulfill daily maintenance tasks, here’s what the daily workflow would look like for the 300-person water department.

The agent comes to the office and picks up the forms

Head to the worksite and fill out forms by hand.

Return to the office to submit the forms.

The administrator processes the forms weekly, entering interventions into a spreadsheet.

What a headache!

To start automating these processes, we worked with Hugo and the rest of his team to design a new internal system to manage their daily maintenance operations digitally.

After initial discussions, our mission was clear: we needed to build them a fully customized app. Boilerplate field inspection software wouldn’t cut it.

To do this, we completed a design sprint to learn their organizational objectives and align the custom app to their needs. We noted all their internal jargon and gathered input from several stakeholders to determine the best way to deliver value to the end users. Finally, we got to work building the app.

Creating a progressive web app with No-Code

Our biggest hurdle in the app development process was building an app that inspectors could truly rely on in the field. Sometimes, the water department visits areas with little or no internet coverage.

As part of their workflow within the app, agents needed to query a large database, and input information they gathered during inspection. They needed to log these site reports from anywhere, even if they’re not online.

Using Dexie, an IndexDB wrapper library, we implemented full offline capability. This empowered agents to input their operations even while in full offline mode. Once the app is back online, we synchronize all operations.

Getting to 100% user adoption in one month

By all accounts, the app we created for La Metro was a smashing success. The water department onboarded all its agents within the app’s first month of operation.

Having designed their operations database for rapid growth and ease of analysis, we immediately began improving the app. La Metro extracted several insights from the data, yielding more accurate forecasts for the future. Geographical data that would have previously gone hidden became vital to their planning.

Hugo agrees that Tinkso’s assistance in bringing the tool to life was indispensable. There isn’t a single field inspection tool on the market that could provide them geographical data with the granularity that their in-house solution has. Not to mention, it allowed them to follow a workflow that made logical sense to their field agents.

In a world where field inspection software is clumsy and difficult to adapt to custom use cases, La Metro benefited significantly from our help. Using our expertise in Bubble, we built them an in-house tool far quicker and cheaper than it would have been to build their own.