The outcome
- Placement changes that took manual effort now happen by dragging a card.
- Ratio and capacity issues surface the moment they'd occur, not after the fact.
- Directors can see the operation three ways — board, staff, and map — in one place.
- A rule engine encodes the organization's real constraints instead of relying on someone remembering them.
The challenge
Staying within staffing ratios and room capacities — and reshuffling when a teacher changed or a campus filled up — was manual, easy to get wrong, and invisible until something already had. A multi-campus childcare organization managed class placement and the daily movement of children between rooms and campuses with static schedules.
How we did it
We built a real-time operational board that makes the whole day visible and editable:
- Kanban-style placement across rooms and campuses
- Time-block scheduling for the full day
- A rule engine that validates ratios and capacity as children are moved, flagging problems before they happen
- Staff and map views — different ways to see the same day
It runs on Next.js and Supabase with drag-and-drop, so a change is a card move, not a spreadsheet rewrite.