Enterprise · IT
Company-wide hardware tracking, deployment states and audits.
Stack: SQL · Internal Dashboard
A custom-built platform tracking 150+ company devices across a Dubai real estate firm.
Device tracking lived in error-prone spreadsheets: no assignment history, no liability records, no audit trail — and assets went missing.
I run the IT estate for a Dubai real estate firm, which means the hardware on that spreadsheet was ultimately my responsibility. The failure modes in the challenge — no assignment history, no liability records, no audit trail — weren't abstract to me: when an asset went missing, I was the person who couldn't answer who had it last. Building the platform myself meant the data model started from the questions I actually needed answered: who has this device, who had it before them, what they signed when they took it, and what maintenance it has had.
The core design decision was to treat a device as a history rather than a row. A spreadsheet stores a device's current state; this platform stores every event in its life — assignment, transfer, return — tied to the employee involved. Liability agreements and maintenance logs attach to the device record itself, so accountability doesn't depend on anyone remembering to file paperwork separately. And the audit trail is automated: generated by the system as events happen, not maintained by hand — which is exactly the discipline a spreadsheet doesn’t enforce.
The stack is deliberately unglamorous: a SQL database behind an internal dashboard. Asset data is relational by nature — devices, employees, assignments, maintenance events — and a relational schema makes the questions that matter cheap to answer: everything this employee currently holds, everything that ever happened to this device, everything deployed in a given department. The dashboards sit on top of that structure, showing deployment status across departments at a glance instead of a filter-and-scroll session through a shared sheet.
The result worth studying isn't the number — it's what sustaining it demands. A tracking system like this only works if it is the sole path a device can travel through: every assignment, transfer and return has to go through the platform, because a single hand-over that happens outside it quietly reintroduces the spreadsheet problem. That's the honest takeaway for anyone considering a similar build: the software is the easier half. The other half is committing to a process where devices move through the system rather than around it — the discipline behind keeping 150+ devices under continuous audit.
All projects — Emad Yahya, web developer in Dubai · Next project: Pharmacy POS System · emaadyahya4@gmail.com