RestAssure for rail and civil engineering

The problem

Elite Civils Projects works in the UK rail, highways and construction sectors, where operatives often travel to site and are put up in hotels near the job. A tired worker on live track or heavy plant is a serious safety risk, and the mandatory rest before a shift only counts if it actually happens.

Companies could book the rooms but had no reliable way to see whether people arrived, stayed overnight or left early. Verification meant phone calls and spreadsheets, and compiling fatigue audit evidence by hand was slow and error-prone.

Elite Civils Projects asked Magora for a lean first version of a product that validates hotel stays automatically, so it could test the idea with its network of large civil engineering contractors. The check had to work without turning into 24/7 tracking of workers or draining their phone batteries.

What we built

RestAssure is designed around UK rail fatigue-management practice: it confirms that travelling workers are in their booked accommodation during the rest window before a shift, and gives operations managers the evidence and the alerts to act on it.

• Automatic check-in and check-out through a geofence around the booked hotel. The app notices arrival in the expected window, flags an early departure as “Out” and recovers automatically if the worker returns, with a manual “Update Geolocation” option when a worker needs to confirm.
• Push reminders 24 hours, 8 hours, 2 hours and 15 minutes before check-in, then escalating reminders if a check-in is missed.
• Two-way contact: workers add a comment for the admin team about a delay, or call the admin in one tap.
• Welfare hub linking to UK support organisations such as Mind and MoneyHelper, with a weekly wellbeing check-in notification.
• Multi-tenant web portal with role-based access for platform admins, organisation admins and employees, who use the mobile app only. Sentinel and CSCS IDs are linked to each worker.
• Bulk bookings by CSV or Excel import and export, with address geocoding, multi-worker assignment and checks for overlapping and duplicate bookings.
• Alerts dashboard for missed check-ins and early check-outs, filterable by hotel, site, employee, date and status, with an admin resolution workflow.
• Audit logs and reports showing expected against actual check-in, check-out and rest duration, exportable to Excel or CSV.

The hard parts

• Phone operating systems limit background work. We combined native geofence triggers with scheduled background checks around the critical windows, to stay accurate without draining the battery.
• GPS drift. A calibrated geofence boundary and checks on fix accuracy stop boundary jitter raising false “Out” or “Missed” alerts.
• Messy spreadsheets. The import handles different UK date formats, Excel serial dates and untidy addresses.
• Privacy. Clear on-screen disclosure for background location and notifications, and location is used only during active stay windows.

Outcome

Elite Civils Projects has presented RestAssure to large civil engineering enterprises as potential clients, and the feedback so far has been positive.

In the client’s own words, the main outcome so far is that RestAssure has moved from an initial concept to a working accommodation validation platform that produces auditable assurance data. The next phase is a controlled deployment with a client, where use, cost avoidance, engagement and fatigue-assurance benefits will be measured against agreed KPIs.

For contractors, the product replaces check-in phone calls and spreadsheets with a single record of who stayed where and when, an alert when someone misses a check-in or leaves early, and exportable reports to support fatigue-management audits.