From Manual Tracking to Real-Time Visibility
J.R. Heineman & Sons is an industrial scaffolding contractor serving complex commercial and heavy industrial plants. Their clients kept asking the same questions: how many scaffolds are we renting, where are they, how long have they been up, and what are they costing us? Those answers lived in spreadsheets, phone calls, and field crews' memory.
We built a progressive web app that turns one QR scan into a live, mapped, costed record of every scaffold in every plant.
map, and start its rental clock
A single system where the office creates orders, the field activates them with a scan, and clients see every scaffold's location, age, and rental cost in real time — plus centralized safety training that stays current for everyone.
No live view for clients
Clients couldn't see how many scaffolds were in their plant, where each one sat, or how long it had been standing. Every status update meant a phone call.
Rental cost tied to memory
Scaffold rental billing depends on knowing exactly when each unit went up and came down. Manual tracking meant disputed durations and leaked billable days.
Field and office disconnected
The crew erecting scaffolds and the office tracking them worked from different information, with no shared record of what was actually standing.
Scattered safety information
Worker safety and training details lived in multiple places, so an update didn't reliably reach everyone relying on it.
Every project starts with one question:
buy, automate, build, or wait?
We find the software that already solves it, vet it against how you work, and get your team running on it. Live in days.
We connect the tools you already use so the manual steps disappear and data moves on its own.
We design and develop something custom from the ground up. Built for how your business runs, owned by you.
We tell you when holding is smarter. You leave with a clear reason and a date to revisit.
Why We Choose Build
- ✗ Buy failed: generic asset trackers don't model scaffolding's rental lifecycle (pending, pre-built, active, stop-rent, archived), plant-level mapping, or the QR-scan-to-GPS field workflow this business runs on.
- ✗ Automate failed: there was no system of record to connect. The data lived on paper and in the field.
- ✗ Wait failed: every untracked rental day and every disputed duration was money leaking now.
Before we recommend anything, we score the project on three things: how unique the work is, what a mistake costs, and how much of it runs on human judgment.
One scan in the field. One live map for the client.
Order
Admin creates the orderOffice staff create a scaffold order with location, company, representative, dimensions, components (legs, decks, handrails, tie-offs, ladders), and rental cost. The order starts in Pending.
Each order generates a unique QR code, printed on a thermal printer and fixed to the physical scaffold. That code is the scaffold's identity for its whole life.
Erect and scan
Activate with GPSWhen the crew builds the scaffold, they scan the QR code. The scan activates the scaffold and captures the phone's GPS reading to place it precisely on the plant map, moving it from pending or pre-built to Active.
Map
Live plant view for clientsEvery scaffold appears on an interactive map of the client's facility, color-coded by age bracket (pre-build, 1-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-180, 181+ days, stop-rent, paused). Clients filter by status and age to see exactly what's standing and for how long.
Scan in place
History on the spotWalking the plant, anyone can scan the QR code on a physical scaffold and pull up that scaffold's full history: status, dates, dimensions, rental cost, and representative.
Stop rent and archive
Costed to the dayA stop-rent scan or admin action closes the rental clock and computes rental cost and cost savings across the scaffold's life. Orders move through stop-rent to archived, with a rent-stopped email notification and a minimum monthly charge rule for short installs.
Report
Exportable oversightLocation and order overviews export to PDF with rental totals, cost savings, and per-scaffold detail, giving clients and leadership a clean record on demand.
Before vs. After
| Metric | Before | With the platform |
|---|---|---|
| Client visibility | Phone calls and guesswork | Live plant map of every scaffold, filterable by age and status |
| Field activation | Manual logs, reconstructed later | One QR scan that activates and GPS-places the scaffold |
| Rental duration | Disputed, error-prone | Automatic, from activation scan to stop-rent |
| History lookup | Ask around | Scan the scaffold, see its full record on the spot |
| Cost and savings | Assembled by hand | Computed per scaffold, exportable to PDF |
| Safety information | Scattered across sources | Centralized, updated once, current for everyone |
“This innovative solution has streamlined our operations and significantly improved our ability to manage our scaffolding assets… If you're looking for a reliable and efficient firm to develop a special needs-based app, Hiero is your number one choice.”
Dale Johnson, Vice President, J.R. Heineman & Sons
The Technical Build
A Laravel API and MySQL core, a QR-and-GPS field workflow, and responsive web and mobile clients scoped to every role.
A PWA so crews scan and activate scaffolds from the phones they already carry, with no app-store install, while admins run orders and reporting from the same system.
Business logic, the scaffold rental lifecycle, and reporting on a Laravel backend with MySQL, served through a responsive Angular front end scoped by role (super admin, admin, company user, supervisor, scaffold worker).
Thermal-printed QR codes tie each physical scaffold to its record. Scanning drives the lifecycle and captures device GPS to place scaffolds precisely on the map.
GPS-placed scaffolds render on an interactive facility map with color-coded status and age indicators.
Configurable status flow (pending, pre-built, active, stop-rent, archived) with automatic rental-cost and cost-savings calculation, minimum monthly charge handling, and rent-stopped email notifications.
Safety training information (drug testing, Great Lakes Safety Training, and more) managed in one place and surfaced by QR, so an update reaches everyone at once.
Still tracking your field assets by phone call and memory?