Case study · Field services

Modernizing a California electrical company without breaking two decades of offline workflow

BEC Inc · Rancho Cucamonga · 2023

The challenge

BEC Inc runs a low-voltage electrical operation in Southern California — site surveys, system design, installation, and service calls across hundreds of commercial clients. For two decades they'd been running on a mix of offline tools: a legacy desktop estimation system, paper work orders, Excel for scheduling. Everything worked. But nothing was accessible from the field, nothing could be searched across jobs, and nothing scaled to a growing crew.

The constraint that defined the engagement: we could not break what already worked. Field crews needed the legacy desktop tools to keep functioning even as we rebuilt the surrounding stack on the web.

Our approach

We built a Laravel-based operational platform that bridged the legacy desktop world with a modern web experience. Three decisions shaped it: (1) read-through caching to the legacy database so nothing had to migrate all at once, (2) a field-crew PWA instead of a native app — zero install friction on crew tablets and phones, (3) nightly sync jobs that kept the legacy desktop tools in step with the new web state so the office staff never had to pick sides.

What we shipped

• Laravel web platform: jobs, estimates, clients, invoicing, scheduling
• Field-crew PWA: offline-capable, syncs when back online
• Bi-directional sync with the legacy desktop estimation system
• Unified client history: search across 20 years of jobs and estimates
• Invoicing pipeline integrated with the existing accounting workflow
• Role-based dashboards for owners, office staff, and field leads

Results

Twenty years of offline workflow preserved. Zero disruption for field crews during rollout. The entire operation is now accessible from phones and tablets. Job lookup — what used to take minutes of digging through folders and Excel — now takes seconds. It became our first California-based white-label engagement in the Rancho Cucamonga footprint and opened the door to the partnership we have there today.