Chime Software powers construction site management with MongoDB Atlas

Ditching the clipboard for the digital age

For decades, the construction industry relied on manual administrative processes where workers would sign into active building sites with pen and paper. A basic clipboard and signature approach that meant workforce management, compliance and payroll were riddled with inefficiencies. Chime Software stepped into this landscape to revolutionize how the sector operated, building an all-in-one digital platform that allows companies to run every requirement of their building sites seamlessly. Today it serves as that sector’s operational backbone, processing tens of thousands of paysheets and more than £100 million in wages every week.

Transitioning an entire industry away from legacy tools requires a technology stack built for continuous evolution. Before platforms like Chime, site infrastructure was brittle, and gathering real-time data on who was on-site, what skills they possessed, or how many hours they worked was painfully slow.

By unifying these disjointed components into a single digital application, Chime provides construction firms with total, real-time visibility into their operations. This modernization shift demands an entirely new level of speed and flexibility to manage diverse, evolving data types in one consolidated view.

"We've historically turned up to building sites where you sign in with pen and paper on a clipboard,” said Dave Hawes, Co-Founder and CTO, Chime. “Now we've got a digital app, so people sign in and do their skills management, holidays, pay—all of it. You can run your whole building site through our software."

Smashing the 70,000-worker crunch

Operating as an industry-standard platform introduces unique operational hurdles, particularly when 70,000 workers attempt to clock into the application at the exact same moment. These massive, predictable traffic spikes create severe scale challenges that legacy relational databases were never designed to handle.

To navigate these high-pressure crunch moments, Chime leverages MongoDB Atlas to scale its infrastructure instantly, optimizing local hard disk configurations and unlocking the exceptional throughput required to process sudden, massive influxes of data seamlessly. This elastic scalability ensures peak performance and low latency during high-velocity workloads, ensuring workers are clocked in safely and paid accurately without operational downtime.

"MongoDB Atlas has been fantastic,” said Hawes. “At the click of a button we can scale up the servers and there's a wide configuration of local hard disks for very high throughput which has been really important for us in managing those spikes."

Unlocking true developer agility

As Chime rapidly scaled from a budding startup into an enterprise-grade environment, maintaining developer velocity was paramount.

Using MongoDB's flexible document model to accelerate development, Chime rapidly turns new feature ideas into reality. Engineering teams can run the database locally inside a Docker image during initial testing cycles before seamlessly deploying directly to the cloud via the MongoDB Atlas hosting platform. Supported by intuitive ecosystem tooling like Studio 3T to easily navigate data, both development and customer support teams can think about data intuitively, allowing Chime to scale efficiently without needing an oversized platform engineering team.

"With MongoDB we can evolve the platform really, really quickly,” said Hawes. “It's very scalable, and it allows our developers to take an idea and get it implemented much faster than the relational databases we found. The developer experience has been excellent.”

With AI poised to transform every industry, Chime is looking ahead to how intelligent applications can revolutionize field safety and operational efficiency. Active building sites are fast-paced, high-stress, and inherently dangerous environments where site managers are constantly facing administrative complexity.

To lift this burden, Chime is developing a sophisticated, multi-agent AI architecture powered by MongoDB. By leveraging native vector search and semantic retrieval capabilities, Chime grounds its AI models in accurate, up-to-date operational data. "Our focus is on using MongoDB as the memory engine for AI agents, creating the foundation for multi-agent systems that can act as an intelligent co-pilot for site managers,” said Hawes.

This robust data engine tracks user behavior to deliver real-time personalization, enabling site managers to get instant answers through simple conversational questions rather than spending hours digging through records. The result is a digital co-worker that delivers highly contextual, trustworthy insights to teams on the ground, ensuring complex projects are executed safely, efficiently, and ahead of the competition.