Case study
One platform for every site record
A configurable field data platform for a UK utilities contractor that wanted the capability in-house. RGA led the client’s own team through the build, and the platform is theirs — owned, hosted and run by the client, built up over five years of daily service, with around 200 people capturing 25,000 records a month.
The challenge
Utilities and construction sites run on records: inspections, site diaries, quality checks, safety observations, waste documentation. Kept on paper and in spreadsheets, those records arrive late, live in silos and are hard to evidence — and every new form means another template, another point solution, or another development project. The people capturing them work outdoors, in gloves, in poor signal, and the record-keeping has to survive those conditions.
Our approach
We built a configurable platform where new digital forms are assembled through configuration — fields, groups, rules and workflows — so an inspection, diary or quality record that used to need a development project is stood up in hours. Records are structured from the moment of capture, and every entry carries its author, time, location and photographic evidence.
The platform is built for site conditions. Crews capture records on phones and tablets through a native iOS field app linked directly to Dataverse: photos are location-stamped, signatures are taken on the device, and work continues through poor signal — drafts are held safely on the device and synchronise when coverage returns.
Observations raised in the field carry a severity and an owner, and follow a full lifecycle — raised, responded to, reviewed and closed — with notifications keeping raiser and owner in step.
The office application is built pro-code in React and TypeScript directly on Microsoft Dataverse — the performance and feel of custom software, inside the enterprise security envelope. The data is secured within the client’s own tenant, and flows into scalable Microsoft Fabric capacity for management intelligence — the same records that run the field operation feed the reporting the business runs on, across three group businesses. The client wanted this in-house from the start: control of the platform, and the capability to build and extend it. RGA led the client’s own team through the build, carried much of the engineering, and left behind a capability that now runs and extends the platform without us.
Outcomes
- Five years in continuous daily service
- Around 200 site and office users capturing 25,000 structured records a month
- One platform serving three group businesses
- Native iOS app in the field, pro-code React application in the office, one platform on Dataverse
- New forms configured and released in hours, with no development cycle
- Every record carrying author, time, location and photographic evidence
- Field observations tracked through to closure, with owners and notifications
- Reporting, exports and Fabric-based management intelligence drawn from the same structured data
- Built by a client team led by RGA — owned, hosted and run in-house, with data secured in Microsoft Dataverse on their own tenant
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