When Eco Wash came to us in 2021, their operations manager was spending tens of hours every week building staff schedules by hand. More than 30 employees. Seven-day operations. A tangle of rules around shift distribution, rest days, and team composition. Excel was holding things together, but barely.
They found us through my older brother. He knew her and made the introduction.
She did not need someone to tell her the process was inefficient. She already knew. What she needed was someone who could actually fix it.
This was not about replacing a spreadsheet with software. That would have been the easy version.
Eco Wash runs a laundry operation with three employee groups: females, males, and drivers. At least 18 people need to be on the floor every day, with minimum driver coverage at all times. Certain days require more physical work. Everyone needs at least one weekend off per month. Nobody works more than five consecutive days. And then there are the edge cases, like employees who share transportation and need aligned schedules.
The rules were not complicated individually. Together, they conflicted constantly.
Getting the prioritization right was the crux of it. When constraints clash, and they always do, the system needs to know what matters most and what can bend. We worked through every trade-off together, mapping out the hard boundaries and the flexible ones.
That process took longer than the build itself. It was the most important part.
The manager logs into a web portal to view current schedules and generate new ones. Employees can check their own assignments. Schedules can be adjusted manually when needed and exported as Excel or PDF.
We considered building a flexible rules engine that could be modified without redeploying. We decided against it. The rules were not going to change often enough to justify the added complexity and cost. Sometimes the simpler decision is the right one.
What took tens of hours now takes less than five minutes. Instead of planning four weeks ahead, she is planning months ahead.
But the real result is simpler than that. She got her time back. Fewer errors meant fewer fires to put out. And with scheduling off her plate, she could focus on what she was actually there to do: hire more people and scale the operation.
The system ran for three years without needing new features. We still push security updates, but the application just works. She's not spending her weeks buried in spreadsheets.
That is what good software should do. Solve the problem and then get out of the way.
"Their skillfulness assisted us in reaching our objective, saving us countless hours and significantly reducing errors. We look forward to work on more projects with them hereafter."
- Lianne Nicole Muller | Manager at Eco wash
.NET 8, ASP.NET Core MVC, C#, Azure (SQL Database, Blob Storage, App Service, DevOps)