A Marauder's Map for Your Workforce

It’s 2024, and the kids and young adults who read and loved the Harry Potter books as they came out have grown up to fill the leadership ranks of every profession - including much of the team here at Tendrel.

So when we came across a common problem we heard across frontline industries, we immediately saw how a tool from the Harry Potter universe once reserved for fiction could be brought into the modern workplace easily and affordably with the help of the Tendrel platform.

A Marauder's Map?

If you aren’t familiar the wizarding world of Harry Potter, some context would probably help.

Diehard Harry Potter fans might scoff at my brevity, but the gist of it is that Harry Potter is a young wizard at a school of magic who ultimately gets his hands on a map that reveals every detail of his school - the Marauder's Map.

This wasn’t any ordinary map that that just showed all the different dormitories, passage ways, and classrooms of the school: it showed the location of every person in the school as they wandered the sprawling grounds. So wielders of the Marauder's Map knew where the teachers that would get them in trouble were, where to find their friends, and how to perfectly sneak away after pulling a slick prank.

So when we were talking with a greenhouse operator down in Guadalajara, MX and they said “I wish I could see where my maintenance team members were in the facility to find them when something breaks down and we need it fixed ASAP”, our now grown up Harry Potter readers immediately had a solution in mind: build a Marauder’s Map into Tendrel. Give them a digital mapping solution showing the different locations within their worksite that shows their workforce at their last known location.

As we talked to more current and potential customers, we realized that this is a problem for indirect labor in general → “which construction site are my supervisors present at?”, “where are my forklift drivers?”, “did the certified food handlers show up at the catering event?”

Through the chorus of questions we caught the tune, and decided go ahead and just use the “magic” of the Tendrel platform to bring the idea to life.

Now we have a working Alpha product that combines an iOS/Android mobile app with a web console experience. From our early testing we think the magic of Tendrel might even be stronger than whatever was used for the Marauder's Map, because we can do a lot of things with historical data on our maps that Harry couldn’t do with his.

We’re excited about what we’ve built but we all work from home, so while we can see our walks to coffee shops, we now want to get it into the hands of people with more interesting problems.

Interested?

We are looking for a limited number of Alpha customers - business owners, general managers, supervisors, or really anyone with a compelling reason to trial our Marauder’s Map. If you’re interested, send us a message (Interest: Location Tracker) letting us know what use case you have in mind. If it seems a fit, we’ll get you set up for free — and look forward to seeing how you use the tool.

And for the other builders out there - we’re taking a platform-first approach to our mapping solution so that others can leverage our technology from within their own software. If you have an application, IoT stack, or any cool piece of tech that you think could be enhanced with our location tracking and mapping features, we’d love to hear from you and find out what we can do together.

Mike Heavner