Corovan — Mission-Critical Logistics Software for 12 Years

For twelve years (2003–2015) we built and evolved the software backbone of a nationwide corporate-relocation company — from the first customer estimate through contracts, work orders and crew scheduling to payroll capture, job billing and the general ledger. The engagement was delivered through Pipeline Technology, Ric's firm before founding Rimar Technology.

The problem

Corporate relocation means commercial and household moves, storage, payroll capture and job billing — plus international freight forwarding. These processes ran through disconnected systems: pricing lived in spreadsheets, orders were re-keyed between departments, accounting (Microsoft Great Plains) was updated by hand, and management made pricing decisions without real data.

What we built

A connected platform covering the entire relocation lifecycle:

• Core operations suite — estimates with scope-of-services and proposals; contracts in multiple pricing models (bid, general-price, not-to-exceed, time & materials); work orders and change orders; manpower scheduling and assignment across jobs and events; vehicles, equipment and materials tracking; timesheets with billing/pay rules; rate schedules for labor, units, overtime and customer drive-time; credit & collections
• Customer-facing web order-entry portal — customers and agents submit orders online; a two-way sync pipeline feeds each order into the core system through cross-server stored procedures with transaction-status tracking (submitted → in-process), so nothing is re-keyed and nothing gets lost between systems
• Self-service Custom Report Generator — operations staff design their own reports: pick the data source, display fields, filters, grouping and sort order, with per-user and per-team access control; an automated generation service delivers report files without IT involvement
• Claims & Quality application — claims register, incident reporting and quality-survey call logs tied to jobs and employees
• Dynamic pricing system for storage services — measurably increased storage-service profits
• Secure document management built for a major fitness-company client
• Payroll export merge & reconciliation service — timesheet data automatically merged into payroll-ready exports with built-in reconciliation checks
• Microsoft Great Plains integration — job-costing export/import (including sales-order import) so accounting is fed by operations data instead of manual entry
• SalesLogix CRM tooling — file-import and data-cleaning utilities plus customization bundles keeping the CRM in step with operational data
• Multi-office database sync utility — automated SQL Server-to-SQL-Server merge with foreign-key mapping and exception handling, keeping distributed offices consistent

The outcome

• Software that formed the backbone of Corovan's core business processes for ~12 years
• Passed Microsoft's rigorous software audit with excellence in best practices and design — a rare distinction
• A suite of more than ten integrated applications replacing manual re-keying across estimating, operations, payroll, accounting and CRM
• The platform supported moves for teams serving Fortune 500 organizations including aerospace, technology and entertainment companies

What they said

“Ric is detail orientated and has a great personality easy to work with and is very creative in his programming he works outside the box.”