HS Baumappe – Document Management Apps for Construction

Now construction site personnel can create documents and share them with coworkers and clients. Even offline, then sync them later. All they need is a smartphone.

_{Mockup example designed by Heinrich Schmid's Product Design Team.}

Numbers:

• 2 mobile apps
• 5 team members
• 1 MVP
• 30 sprints

Skills

iOS development: SwiftUI + UIKit, Swiftgen, Apollo GraphQL, CoreData, SwiftLint, SwiftFormat, Sourcery, Bitrise.

Android development: Jetpack Compose, Kotlin Flows, Apollo GraphQL, WorkManager, Room, Hilt.

Project management & documentation: Jira, Figma, Github, Notion, Miro, GitHub Actions.

About HS Baumappe

HS Baumappe are offline-first iOS and Android native applications built for German company Heinrich Schmid, representing the construction sector.

Mobile applications have been developed for clients’ employees who work on construction sites. The apps enable the creation and sharing of documents among the construction crew with clients and external contractors.

The goal of the solution

The ultimate goal of the solution is to manage the whole construction documentation via smartphone or tablet and eliminate paper documentation.

_{Mockup examples designed by Heinrich Schmid's Product Design Team.}

The challenge of building the document management app for construction

Construction sites are places where the internet connection is weak or simply doesn’t exist. Therefore from the beginning, the priority was to build the offline-first application. It needed plenty of preparations during the requirement phase to determine when and how the apps should operate depending on the quality of the internet connection.

Developing offline mode is always an interesting technological challenge. However, this is a feature that we successfully delivered for our other clients (check vCare case study). Thanks to an offline mode users can create any document without an internet connection and the app will store the data on the user’s device. All files will be synchronized when the internet connection is back.

_{Mockup example designed by Heinrich Schmid's Product Design Team.}

HS Baumappe development process

Heinrich Schmid reached out to us in 2021 with a strong vision of the mobile apps based on the web solution they had already been using in their organization. The client knew exactly what features they needed to continue a digital transformation of the construction site doc workflow. Heinrich Schmid provided us with designs reviewed by their internal testing group representing end users.

Bright Inventions team consists of 4 experienced mobile developers and a project manager. We take full advantage of Scrum working in 2-week sprints.

The first step was to release the MVP and present it to the client’s employees to gather feedback.

The client trusted us to choose the best solutions for native application development. Therefore we use top tools such as SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose. It’s worth mentioning that the Android application’s UI is built from the scratch with Jetpack Compose and Jetpack Compose Navigation.

We also made an important decision regarding the app architecture. We decided to build HS Baumappe as a multi-module application. Instead of building an app as a huge monolith, we separated the code into single responsibility modules. As a result, it improved developers’ productivity because of the shorter build time, clarity and interoperability. Developing multi-module apps is not something visible to users but takes a huge part in fastening the development process and, in the end, helps to save costs.

Bright Inventions’ team takes care exclusively of mobile development. The backend is developed by another software company. It requires close cooperation between various development teams to sync apps with the backend properly.

HS Baumappe was released in December 2022 as an MVP. Now the focus group is testing the solution and is gathering extended feedback regarding the UX and features.

Client’s Perspective

The collaboration with Bright Inventions started off very promising. Based on our business needs, they gave great architectural advice, important technical information, and overall good guidance, which allowed an ambitious start into the project.

After months of smooth development and satisfying output, we were challenged with some very critical technical barriers, which collided with our business vision of the app. Due to great proactive efforts on Bright Inventions side, the Heinrich Schmid IT team, and the good communication towards our third-party backend developer team, we overcame this hurdle and managed to get the app behavior as envisioned and desired.

With the currently ongoing MVP release, the only point of criticism our users raised is the following: “We want more features!”. Therefore, the MVP release is a great success so far and we envision a lot more features to come in the app, together with our partner Bright Inventions.

Leon Seiz, Product Owner at Heinrich Schmid

What’s next for Heinrich Schmid and Bright Inventions?

Our team is working on other features such as time tracking and performance recording. We plan to release another app version dedicated to a bigger group of end users. The ultimate goal is to deliver mobile apps that all Heinrich Schmid construction crews will use.