Prestarts, job sheets, timesheets, photos and sign-off, captured on site and back in the office system the same day. Built to work with no coverage at all.
The people doing the work are not at a desk. They are on a roof, in a pit, in a truck, at a customer's loading dock. Field service app development in Australia has to start from that, because most business software is designed by people sitting down for people sitting down, and it shows the moment a form needs two hands, good light and a stable connection.
What we build is the tool the crew actually uses on site — prestart checks, job sheets, timesheets, photos and sign-off, plant inspections, stocktakes, delivery confirmation and site diaries. It runs on the phone or tablet already in their pocket, it works when there is no signal, and it sends what it captured into your office systems as soon as coverage comes back.
The gap it closes is usually a delay measured in weeks. Paper is filled in on site, travels back in a ute, sits in a tray, and gets entered at month end — or not at all. By the time the office sees a variation, the job is finished and the argument is harder. By the time a prestart fault is read, the machine has been running on it for a fortnight.
An app is not automatically better than paper, and a bad one is worse. If it takes longer than the docket book, crews route around it and you have paid for a system that produces no data. The test is simple. Does the person on site finish faster with it than without it.
Daily prestarts, pre-operational checks and defect reporting recorded against a specific asset. A fault raised at 6am creates a maintenance job that morning, instead of being found on a paper pad three weeks later, or after the breakdown.
What was done, who did it, what materials went on, what held things up. Structured enough to report on, quick enough that it gets completed before the crew leaves site rather than reconstructed from memory that evening.
Start, finish, breaks, cost codes and allowances, recorded against a job rather than a week. Captured once on site and passed through to payroll and job costing, so nobody is transcribing a smudged timesheet on Monday morning.
Photos attached to the job, the asset and the step they belong to, with a customer or supervisor signature captured on the glass. Images are compressed on the device, because a hundred photos a day per crew on mobile data adds up fast.
Scan or search, count what is there, confirm what arrived and what was short. Counts reconcile straight against your inventory or ERP system, instead of into a spreadsheet that gets emailed around and then argued about.
The app writes to the device first and treats the network as an occasional bonus, so a crew can complete a full shift underground, in a shed, or out past the last tower with no coverage at all. When a signal appears it uploads in the background and shows plainly what has synced and what is still queued. Records are reconciled on the server in capture order, so two devices touching the same job does not quietly overwrite one of them.
We spend a day with the people who will use it. What they carry, what is on their hands, where the signal drops, what they write on now. This is not a workshop with managers — the crew decides whether an app gets used or worked around.
We map the paperwork exactly as it exists, every field on the prestart and every column on the docket, then work out which of them has ever been used for anything. Most paper forms lose a third of their fields here and lose nothing else.
We design for one thumb, bright sunlight, gloves and a cracked screen — big targets, short forms, sensible defaults, as few free-text boxes as we can get away with. Then it goes in front of the crew early, on the devices they will really be holding.
Captured data flows into what the office already runs — job costing, payroll, maintenance, your accounting package — through the same system integration and workflow automation work that removes the rekeying step entirely. Paper that has to stay paper can be read automatically with document AI.
In the field, the data shows where people are struggling. The screen everyone abandons. The field everyone leaves blank. We keep refining it, and feed the captured data into the operational dashboards your supervisors and managers use.
Yes, and that is the default assumption rather than an add-on. The app writes to the device first, so a full shift can be completed with no signal at all — which is normal on mining sites and plenty of construction sites. When coverage returns it syncs in the background, and the crew can see what has been sent and what is still waiting.
Both sets of changes are kept. The server reconciles them in capture order, and where there is a genuine conflict — two different answers to the same field — it is flagged for a supervisor rather than silently resolved. What counts as a conflict is agreed with you during design, because the right answer differs between businesses.
Both work, and it is usually a policy decision rather than a technical one. Personal phones cost you nothing and people look after them. Company devices are easier to control and survive site better. We build for rugged tablets and five-year-old Androids alike, and test on the oldest device in your fleet, because that is the one that finds the problems.
Subscription pricing, not fixed-price projects — monthly billing, a three-month minimum term, thirty days' notice to cancel. What moves the figure is the number of distinct forms and workflows, how many office systems it writes back into, and whether you need iOS, Android or both. Email outreach@drawnai.app and we will talk through scope.
Least disruptive when it replaces one form first rather than all of them. One crew or one site runs it alongside paper for a fortnight, the paper stops, then the next form follows. Training is usually about fifteen minutes. If a screen needs more explanation than that, the design is wrong and we change it.
Not necessarily. For a workforce app, distributing through your own device management, an enterprise channel or a browser-based install is often simpler and much faster to update. Public store listings make sense when people outside your organisation need it — subcontractors on their own phones. We will tell you which fits before we build.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.
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