What wasn't working
A regional structural engineering firm was managing hundreds of active and historical projects across spreadsheets, shared drives, and tribal knowledge. Search took minutes when it should have taken seconds, project handoffs lost context, and there was no good way to surface previous similar work when pricing a new RFP.
What we built
We designed and built a custom project database from the ground up — schema modeled around their actual workflow (project → discipline → revision → drawing set), file architecture rebuilt to match, and an internal admin UI for engineers to retrieve any historical project by client, sector, jurisdiction, or structural system. Servers and storage built on hardware we specified and assembled; backup and 24/7 monitoring layered on top.
What changed
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Project lookup time dropped from several minutes of searching to seconds. New RFPs are now priced against actual historical project metrics rather than estimates. Disaster-recovery posture moved from 'hopefully the file server is fine' to nightly off-site backups with documented restore drills.