The majority of roofing companies in the industry are making their employees draw a sketch of a roof based on measurements taken for at least 75 percent of the roofs that are contracted to be built or repaired. Once this process has been completed the roofers need to take the data they have complied as well as the sketch and upload it into a system that the company is using.

Entrepreneur-In-Residence, David Peters, realized this is an ineffective way of doing business due to the fact most of the roofing job requests happen during a two-week span at two specific times of the year. The current process slows down how quickly the turn around time is therefore cutting into the number of clients they can accept, business profits, etc.

The students at the ACE Project Space built a web-application to present a solution to this challenge. The solution is “RoofBundle”, an application where the roofers can compile the data of the roof they have gathered into a form and sketch the roof digitally. Once the roofer has completed that step then the application should build an estimate of the cost of building/repairing the roof, a work order of job, and a purchase order of the materials necessary to complete the job.

The students built a comprehensive content management system, and delivered a minimal viable product on this job: a website where the roofer can login; fill out all the necessary forms for the complied roof data they have; and generate an estimate. After this process has been accomplished, the roofer will proceed to the drawing canvas page where they will be able to sketch a basic hip or gable style roof and adjust the pitch as necessary to make an accurate drawing. Finally, the roofer will have ability to save a pdf file with the roof sketch on it and all the necessary calculations on it.

Technologies used: Userfrosting Framework; Twig; HTML; PHP; AJAX; JQuery; Javascript; YAML; CSS; Bootstrap; MySQL; and DigitalOcean.

Have a look at their web portal at this link: http://roofbundle.com/

Here are some more screenshots from the website and the estimating application:

Screen capture of RoofBundle website

Login screen

Start screen within the estimating app

A detail view of the canvas drawing of a roof in the estimating software

The app is able to produce PDFs to export roof data that has been collected