OrtApp
A mobile-first app for engineers in the field and a live desktop portal for the people dispatching them. The existing service desk platform stays the source of truth for tickets, clients and time; OrtApp gives the team a phone-shaped way to work and gives the back office a picture of where everyone is.
Built for An IT managed service provider running a field engineering team
This one runs on live business data, so there is no public demo. A walkthrough on a call is the next best thing, and we are happy to do it.
200 m
Default check-in radius
20 s
Dispatch screen refresh
Both are deployed configuration values rather than claims: the geofence radius a check-in is measured against, and how often the live dispatch board redraws.
Engineers were using a desktop service desk interface on their phones - slow, dense, and designed for a keyboard - or falling back to paper and messages. Arrival and departure times were reconstructed from memory at the end of the day. Dispatch had no live view of who was on site, and a customer asking to move an appointment meant juggling a calendar on one screen and a phone call on the other.
Engineers get today’s jobs, one-tap navigation and contact, geofenced check-in and check-out that writes real time entries, and a signed job sheet captured on the phone. Dispatch gets a live map, an hour-by-hour board they can drag appointments around, and an inbox where approving a reschedule actually reschedules it. Everything writes back to the platform the business already runs on.
Check-in reads the phone’s location and confirms the engineer is at the site. Out of range or no signal, it still checks them in and records the doubt rather than blocking anyone standing in a basement - and the ticket status and time entry are raised automatically either way.
The customer signs on the screen, leaves a comment and a rating, and the engineer attaches before-and-after photos from the camera. The app builds a tidy PDF job sheet and uploads it and every photo to the ticket, then marks the work complete.
One map with every engineer pinned at their most recent check-in, headline tiles for jobs today, completed today and engineers currently on site, and a list showing who has been where since when. It refreshes on its own while it sits on the wall.
Today’s jobs as an hour-by-hour grid. Drag a card to a new slot and the change is pushed straight to the service desk platform. Reschedule and extra-visit requests raised by engineers arrive in the same place, and approving one books it.
A private field note posts to the ticket as internal and is visible to every agent immediately. A public note is emailed to the customer, and is fenced at every layer so it can never go out by accident. Time can be logged onto the same note with a quick preset.
Three layers of caching sit in front of the service desk API, and every one of them degrades to a live read rather than breaking. Tables that run to thousands of rows are virtualised, and the screens behind the buttons are fetched before they are tapped.
Chosen for how long it will stay supportable, not for what was interesting that year. Everything below is in production in this project today.
The work this involved
OrtApp started as somebody describing a process that had stopped working. If that sounds familiar, that is all we need to start.
Discovery and written scope - free, and yours to keep