Placard Wizard

Placard Wizard is a software-as-a-service platform used by transportation companies across North America to produce accurate hazmat placards for trucks that haul hazardous materials. The product was built by Rick Rice, an operations manager and software developer who saw a gap in how the trucking industry handled a critical safety and compliance task.

TimothyRidge LLC, the company behind Placard Wizard, now provides this software to some of the largest transportation companies in the country, all of whom depend on it to stay compliant with federal hazmat regulations.

In the early 2000s, Rick began developing an algorithm to solve a specific, high-stakes problem: producing hazmat placards that met 49 CFR Part 172 compliance requirements. Getting a placard wrong isn't a minor error. It's a regulatory and safety issue for any company moving hazardous materials on public roads.

Rick's algorithm worked, but it was built to run in one environment. To reach the scale of a real SaaS product, and to serve enterprise transportation companies running different systems and platforms, the underlying software needed to work across multiple environments, including large, established IT infrastructures at national and international carriers.

Rick needed a development partner who could take a working idea and turn it into portable, enterprise-ready software, and then support it for the long haul.

We worked with Rick to rebuild his hazmat compliance algorithm as reusable, cross-platform code. Rather than treating the algorithm as a single application, we restructured it into class libraries that other systems could call directly, giving Placard Wizard the flexibility to plug into whatever environment a transportation company was already running.

From there, our relationship expanded well beyond the initial build. We became TimothyRidge LLC's ongoing development and hosting partner, supporting everything from platform updates to mission-critical infrastructure.

Cross-platform class libraries

The compliance algorithm was developed as a portable C# .NET class library and a Java Bean-compliant version, so it could be called from different platforms and integrated directly into the enterprise systems used by Placard Wizard's transportation company clients.

Java integration support

We provide ongoing Java IDE consulting to support the Java side of those enterprise integrations, along with terminal license management services for Placard Wizard's own customer base.

Reliable, redundant hosting

Hosting is built for reliability: we run redundant backup hosting in a separate geographic region, so the platform stays available even in the event of a regional outage, along with Google Analytics reporting to help track platform usage.

Placard Wizard now hosts mission-critical compliance software used by top transportation companies across North America, and TimothyRidge LLC has trusted us with that hosting for more than 20 years without interruption.

The relationship has grown into a long-term development partnership, with a consistent track record of hitting delivery timelines. TimothyRidge LLC has worked with us across in-person and virtual meetings for over 20 years, relying on our team not just for one project, but as their go-to software developer for each new phase of the platform's growth.

In a Clutch review, TimothyRidge LLC's President also noted:

"TJCO is one of the finest software and web development firms we've had the pleasure of working with. Their team is consistently professional, knowledgeable, and kind."

They added that the company is confident in the team's ability to stay current with emerging technology, and that the project has consistently met expected timelines throughout an ongoing, multi-year engagement.

Placard Wizard is a good example of what a long-term technology partnership can look like. If your business needs custom software built around a specific process, a mobile app to extend that software to the field, or reliable hosting for a platform your customers depend on, explore: