Fulcrum Dynamic is a small design and development company based in Round Rock, Texas. Established in 2019, our company goes above and beyond to make sure you have what you need to save time, resources, and effort. We bring world-class solutions to help you streamline your processes and lessen mundane concerns.

Working with an expert to wrangle the wild world of technology is vital, but choosing the right partner is almost as hard as figuring out the technology itself.  Who can you trust?

As we aim to prove the quality of our services to the public, the news that we’re about to share excites us. Most recently, Fulcrum Dynamic made its official debut on Clutch and received amazing client feedback for our work.

What is Clutch?

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Clutch is a B2B review and rating platform designed to help browsers navigate through the IT, development, marketing, and business services fields. The site is trusted by millions of corporate buyers and service providers, and it’s home to a massive collection of data-driven client reviews.

For our first-ever review, Dan Francis, the owner of StepStone Realty, LLC, wrote about our web development services. StepStone has been a long-time partner over the years, and the review was published on September 09, 2021.

Our main responsibilities involved API integration, middleware integration, and ensuring security upgrades for their platform. We worked closely with the client to make sure everything ran smoothly despite the challenges brought by the pandemic last year.

In the results and feedback section, the client wrote this when asked about what was the most unique aspect of our team:

“They were easy to work with, understood the goals, and easy to read code, allowing them a successful partnership.” — Owner, StepStone Realty, LLC

This is such an amazing review. This is an important milestone for us and we look forward to gaining traction on Clutch soon. If you’re curious about the full scope of this project, you may check out our profile on Clutch for further details.

With that being said, the whole Fulcrum Dynamic team sends their sincerest appreciation and thanks to StepStone Realty, LLC for helping us with our first review. As for our other clients, you can help us in this journey by providing us with your insights.

Making Waves in the ECommerce Space

The present and the future lies in eCommerce. As businesses take on the massive industry, Fulcrum Dynamic is stoked to be a trusted partner. Just recently, we’ve been made aware that Top Design Firms recognized us for our professional eCommerce development work.

To get you up to speed, Top Design Firms is a new B2B website that showcases the work and projects of industry experts like ourselves. According to their latest findings, Fulcrum Dynamic is among the top eCommerce web design and development companies in 2021.

We could not be more grateful for this overwhelming recognition. Our team is pumped to help more companies venture into the vast eCommerce market. Thank you Top Design Firms, our team, and our valued clients! Work with us and let’s help you reach your business goals. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line and tell us more about what projects you have in mind. Harness the power of technology with Fulcrum Dynamic.

Our client is a market leader in oil field logistics and transload services.  They own and manage a nationwide network of transload terminals where they store and move millions of pounds of bulk sand, crude, and other materials to and from trucks, railcars, silos, and other containers.  Their services are a critical element in the energy supply chain in North America.

Problem

The client runs transload facilities across the country, with an especially high concentration in the Southwest. At these facilities, they load, unload, and store bulk materials for their customers, primarily frac sand to be used in drilling oil wells. When material is loaded and shipped out from the terminal via truck, the driver is issued a bill of lading. The client manages all of the operations at their terminals with their custom terminal management application, which we helped them build.

All load actions are tracked in the application, arrival and departure weights for the trucks are captured from the on-site truck scales, and a signature is captured electronically from the driver. The application uses all this data to automatically generate a correct and accurate bill of lading, which is printed out and handed to the driver. A copy is also stored in the cloud as a PDF for later reference.

The process is highly efficient and allows them to quickly process trucks at their sites, and maintain uniform processes at every location across the company. In fact, the system worked so well that another company approached our client about licensing their system to manage their own terminals. However, the partner company had certain specific feature sets which they required before implementing the system at their own facilities.

The most significant feature request was an easier way to modify bills of lading after the fact, as well as tracking those modifications. The bill of lading contains a large assortment of data about the load: customer, service company, product, tare and gross weights, purchase order number, driver name, signature, etc. One strategy used in the terminal management system to eliminate data entry errors is to provide dedicated screens for different steps in the loading process. These dedicated screens only allow entering the specific data relevant to that step (entering order data, receiving a new truck, loading the truck, collecting the final weight and dispatching the truck), and a series of statuses ensures that only the trucks at a given step can be accessed on that screen.

While this structure is very effective at preventing errors, on the rare occasion that an error did occur, resolving the issue was a bit cumbersome. A user with administrative access would have to manually revert the statuses on the truck to edit the different fields. As the client’s business continued to grow, even a steady low error percentage inevitably grew to a larger administrative task, and for their partner, it was a non-starter. They needed a way to edit all the relevant details about a truck on a single page.

Solution

Making a single page form with all the relevant fields for a truck is trivial. However, the system provides numerous checks to make sure that the order matches the customer, the job matches the order, the product matches all these things, and so on. Additionally, the quantity for each draft (load event) needed to total up to match the net weight calculated from the gross and tare, and vice versa. Since every piece of data could be modified, every other piece of data needed to be checked in real-time to make sure things still added up. Additionally, there were a series of dependent select fields (drop-down menus), where the user’s choice in one menu would affect the available options in other menus.

The core terminal management system was built as a web application, running in the cloud, backed by a relational database, with the user interface rendered in the browser with HTML. Additional UI enhancements were implemented using JavaScript. However, the level of interactivity required for this page would have been an overly complex mess to implement. Instead, we opted to use Angular.

Angular is an open-source JavaScript UI framework built by Google and used by a wide range of organizations around the world. Angular allows you to define a scope, a set of JavaScript variables. You can then reference those scope variables in your page template, in functions you write to call on that page, and in event triggers. The variables in the scope are shared around the page, so any time the variable is updated, the references to it are automatically updated as well.

We used these capabilities to automatically update the gross tare and net weights based on the total of the drafts, keeping the net weight matched to the sum of the drafts. We built a integration to allow Chosen.JS’s searchable select boxes to interact with Angular scope variables. Any time a value was updated in a drop-down menu (Customer, Order, Job, Product) we could automatically trigger updates elsewhere in the form. When a change in value caused the available options in another select box to be modified, we would pull an updated option list from the API via AJAX.

One particularly challenging component was dealing with transient load sources. The system tracks which container is used to load each draft in the truck. That way, if there is a contamination or other quality issue with the material on that truck, the system can easily tell you where it loaded from, in order to locate and mitigate the source of the problem. However, trucks are often loaded directly from railcars, which by their nature are mobile. Every day, empty railcars are removed from the facility, and full ones arrive to replace them. The system provides a list of railcars, silos, and other containers that are available to load from and have the matching product for the truck. However, if you are editing a BOL from a truck that has already left, the current list of load sources may be different from the list at the time that truck was on site. And if you modify the arrival and departure timestamps for the truck, the list of available load sources will change again. We had to extend the load source API so that you could query based on timestamps and lookup which load sources were on-site during that window of time and contained the specific product at that time (because a container might be emptied of one product, and refilled with another). Any change to the truck’s arrival and departure times would trigger another query to this API, causing the list of available load sources to be updated in real-time.

All of these changes are managed exclusively on the client-side, without modifying the database. Once the user is happy with their changes, they submit the edits to the system. A series of validation checks are run, to make sure the business rules are applied correctly, and the bill of lading is updated in the system. A new PDF is generated and stored in the cloud for future reference.

However, since this modified BOL is different from the document the driver signed, and was handed during dispatch, the modified BOL document does not bear the driver’s digital signature. Instead it contains a note indicating that the BOL has been modified, as well as an attached log, listing all the changes made to the document.

The system stores the original BOL document, as well as every revised version, with the attached change log. Each version can be downloaded on demand from the application.

Result

This project was a huge time saver for the administrative support team tasked with handling these BOL modifications. Changes that were once a considerable headache could be handled in a matter of seconds. Because there were fewer opportunities for error, much of this work was able to be delegated back to the terminal operations team, which dramatically reduced turn around time, since the fix could be made by a manager who was physically on-site, rather than submitted to a queue with a host of other issues to be resolved by the support team, who would previously have to call the terminal and investigate the issue to determine exactly what the correct data would be.

The revision history showing previous versions, and listing the corrections, provided traceability in case of any questions down the road.

Additionally, the same single-page interface also allowed us to implement a “Manual BOL” process. If a facility loses Internet access, they cannot access the terminal management system, since it is hosted in the cloud. However, trucks still need to be loaded and processed. Delaying loads could cause well site operations to stop, which can be extremely costly for our client’s customers, and might even lead to canceled contracts. Thus, if a facility’s Internet access is down, they must revert to a paper BOL form, a copy of which is kept in a file at the terminal. Once Internet access is restored, the paper BOL can be scanned, and the relevant data is entered on the “Manual BOL” screen. This screen is basically the same form as the BOL editing interface, except a new bill of lading is created, rather than modifying an existing one.

Finally, this feature was a non-negotiable requirement for our client’s partner who licensed the system, and implementing this allowed this strategic partnership to move forward. This lead to deploying the client’s custom terminal management system to over 40 locations across the US and Canada, and opening an entirely new revenue stream for the business. It also strengthened the partnership with that client, leading to additional future projects.

Our client is a market leader in oil field logistics and transload services.  They own and manage a nationwide network of transload terminals where they store and move millions of pounds of bulk sand, crude, and other materials to and from trucks, railcars, silos, and other containers.  Their services are a critical element in the energy supply chain in North America.

Problem

This transload company contracted with one of their clients to install 4 200 ft silos to store frac sand and more quickly process inbound and outbound loads from one of their facilities. The silo installation included a pit and bucket elevator system for unloading railcars, truck scales and gate valves for loading trucks, and an automation system to control all this equipment remotely from an onsite scale house.

The facility is owned operated by the transload provider, but the silos would be owned by the client and used exclusively for their product. The silos were constructed because this was one of the busiest terminals in the region, with an extremely high volume of trucks.

The facility is located in a small town on one of its major thoroughfares, and the long line of trucks waiting to be loaded had caused traffic blockage for the entire town, much to the annoyance of local residents.

The silos were designed to be managed using an piece of industrial automation software called a SCADA (short for “supervisory control and data acquisition”). This significant investment in mechanical equipment and software promised to increase throughput for the terminal. However, since the SCADA was provided by their client, the transload company had no control over the software, and limited access to its data.

Our client has a custom terminal management application, which we helped them build, and which manages inventory, bills of lading, transload billing, and all other aspects of on-site terminal operations. It also feeds data to report systems used by management and customers to make strategic decisions.

Any loads into and out of the silos needed to be tracked in the terminal management application in order to maintain accurate inventory, and to generate correct bills of lading. Additionally, the terminal management application needed to feed data into the SCADA system about the trucks being loaded through the silos, to ensure the correct product was loaded on each truck.

Solution

The SCADA system implemented at this site had limited integration capabilities. However, it was configured to write out a log of trucks unloaded and railcars loaded to a local MySQL database, in two separate tables. The system also had the ability to consume an XML feed of incoming trucks.

We had previously built the client a custom microservice service in Node.JS. It ran on an appliance installed at each of their facilities, and collected data from truck scales, interfacing with the terminal management application in the cloud through a REST API.

We modified this service, adding a microservice to provide the XML feed the SCADA required, pulling data from the terminal management application. We also added a service which would repeatedly poll the SCADA database for new and updated records in the relevant tables. Any new loads would be translated to the format required by the terminal management system’s REST API, and forwarded to that system, in as close to real time as possible.

Result

This project had a very tight deadline but we were able to execute quickly and deploy our solution within just a few days. Our client’s operators on-site were able to run the automation system and load trucks far more quickly, increasing throughput while decreasing traffic.

The automation system received the truck and product data it needed to correctly assign products. The operations team was able to generate bills of lading through the terminal management application, utilizing all the optimizations already present in that system.

Since all load and unload events occurring at the silos were automatically logged in the terminal management application, they were able to track inventory without manual double entry, saving time and avoiding errors.

The transload provider was able to exceed expectations for their client, and the terminal became the most productive site in the client’s entire logistics network.

Our client is a market leader in oil field logistics and transload services.  They own and manage a nationwide network of transload terminals where they store and move millions of pounds of bulk sand, crude, and other materials to and from trucks, railcars, silos, and other containers.  Their services are a critical element in the energy supply chain in North America.

Problem

At each of the client’s loading facilities, they have operate one or several truck scales, industrial scales large enough to weigh an entire 18-wheeler, truck and cab.

When a truck arrives on site, the facility operations staff weigh the truck in, then sends the truck to get loaded somewhere else on site. After loading, the truck is weighed again. So you have an initial weight (tare) and a final weight (gross). The difference gives you the weight actually loaded on the truck while it was on site (minus any fuel consumed during the time period).

The scales have a series of pressure-sensitive load cells, which are all connected to a metal box, called an “Indicator” which is located in the small office where the terminal operator sits, at a computer.

The client wanted to be able to have that scale value feed directly into their custom terminal management system, so the operator doesn’t have to manually type the number in, and risk incorrect entry. This application, by the way, is a web-based cloud application, not something running locally on the PC.

We found there was a wide variety of scale indicators from different vendors in use. Some were network-enabled with RJ-45 ethernet ports or even wireless ports, but a lot just had 9 pin serial ports. We found that if we connected a PC to the serial or ethernet port on the scale, via Hyperterminal, it was constantly streaming a steady flow of raw data. However, the format of that data varied, depending on the vendor.

Solution

We ended up building a Node.JS service, which would open a socket to the scale indicator, and read the raw data stream. We built separate profiles for the different formats used by different scale vendors, so the service could interpret them. We also added logic to ignore variations caused by wind, and cut down network chatter. Then we deployed this service on a little headless appliance PC at each terminal.

Initially, the service simply provided a REST API to allow us to request scale weights on demand, but this required port forwarding at each location, which was not always possible, and when it was, made setup more complicated. Later, we reworked it so the service would push the weight data up to the cloud whenever there was a change.

Either way, the terminal operator, sitting at the PC, entering data about the truck could simply click a button, and capture the weight from the scale inside the web application, cutting data entry errors down dramatically, and making the data entry process much smoother.

Result

The weights collected from these truck scales are used to automatically generate a bill of lading for each truck departing one of the client’s transload facilities. Feeding the scale data directly into the client’s custom web application, not allowed saved employees time improved truck processing efficiency, it also eliminated a source of errors, allowing the client to have confidence that the information printed on their bills of lading is correct.

Client

For this project, we were our own client.  This is a solution we built to streamline our own internal operations process at Fulcrum Dynamic.  Fulcrum Dynamic is a custom software development and consulting agency.  We provide solutions for our clients using technology.  Our primary expertise is in web development with Node, PHP, JS, and Python.

Problem

We had been using Toggl for our time tracking, in order to accurately bill clients for hourly work. However, reports generated by Toggl were not quite sufficient to use as an invoice.  They did not include pricing, billing information, or our company branding.  It just did not look very professional.  We tried exporting the data to a spreadsheet template, but that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Solution

In order to generate better-looking invoices more efficiently, we decided to write a script that would parse our Toggl reports and generate nicely formatted invoices in HTML and PDF formats.  The script is built in Ruby and runs on the command line.  It reads from a YAML config file to specify the address and client information.  It can read CSV files exported from Toggl, or pull a date range from Toggl’s reporting API.  We also later added a second script that can export time tracking info from Toggl via their API and upload it to Freshbooks through their API.

We decided to make all the scripts available for free on GitHub.  You can take a look and try to modify them for your needs here: github.com/eimajenthat/toggl-invoice

Results

This script was a first step in automating our billing and invoicing processes.  We continued to innovate and iterate on the process and built a solid foundation that allowed us to scale the business from a one-man show to a distributed team of over 6 engineers and other staff members.

Client

Our client is a Real Estate Company based in Austin, Texas.  They have built a successful business around creative real estate.  They provide a number of services to help their investor agents close deals more effectively, from short sale processing, to mentoring.  They pride themselves on the flexibility they can offer to their agents, unlike more traditional real estate firms.

Problem

Our client was already using Kashoo but was manually copying data from one system to the other, wasting a lot of time in the process.  We provided the tools to let them automate imports and exports between the two systems. They had been using an extensive custom internal back-office application written on the LAMP stack which needed to be integrated with Kashoo Simple Cloud Accounting.  LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Together, they provide a proven set of software for delivering high-performance web applications, and Kashoo enables you to achieve the customization you need with detailed reporting, a simple user interface, and all the functionality of an accountant without the complications from the actual accounting process. Take it as a way to simplify your accounting needs. They were hoping to transition from something complicated into something simpler to handle their accounting needs.

Solution

We provided a library to make it easy to talk to the Kashoo API.  This allowed them to build functionality into their custom back-office management system to send and receive sales data between their accounting system (Kashoo), and the back-office system.

We want to thank our clients for their generosity in giving us permission to share the scripts for free on GitHub, we don’t normally take the code you paid for and give it away to everyone else for free.  You can take a look and try to modify them for your needs here: https://github.com/eimajenthat/kashoo-php

Results

This integration was a first step in simplifying what was originally a complicated system with a lot of manual data entry. It has enabled their team to work more efficiently on their tasks and has gotten rid of the worry of committing accounting errors.