Construction Job Costing Agent — MCP Server + MCP Apps

A proof-of-concept MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that provides construction job costing data and interactive visualizations for Pacific Northwest Builders Inc., a fictitious general contractor.

What This POC Proves

1. MCP as a data backend for Copilot — An MCP server can serve structured financial data (jobs, cost codes, change orders, cash flow) to M365 Copilot via SSE transport.

2. MCP Apps for rich UI — Tool responses include ui:// resources with self-contained HTML views (SVG charts, interactive tables) that render inline in the Copilot panel.

3. Domain-specific agent — A declarative agent manifest gives Copilot the persona and instructions of a construction finance analyst.

4. No external dependencies for charts — All visualizations use inline SVG — no Chart.js, D3, or other libraries.

Related MCP server: LumenX-MCP Legal Spend Intelligence Server

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│         M365 Copilot / Chat         │
│  (Declarative Agent: Job Cost       │
│   Analyst)                          │
└──────────────┬──────────────────────┘
               │ SSE (port 3001)
               ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│        MCP Server (Node.js)         │
│  ┌───────────┐  ┌────────────────┐  │
│  │  tools.ts  │  │   data.ts     │  │
│  │  7 tools   │  │  6 jobs       │  │
│  │            │  │  cost codes   │  │
│  │  Handlers  │  │  change orders│  │
│  │  + UI refs │  │  cash flow    │  │
│  └───────────┘  └────────────────┘  │
│  ┌──────────────────────────────┐   │
│  │  views/ (HTML+SVG)           │   │
│  │  • job-dashboard.html        │   │
│  │  • cost-breakdown.html       │   │
│  │  • budget-vs-actual.html     │   │
│  │  • cashflow-forecast.html    │   │
│  │  • change-orders.html        │   │
│  └──────────────────────────────┘   │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

Setup

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build TypeScript
npm run build

# Start the server
npm start

The server starts on http://localhost:3001 with SSE endpoint at /sse.

Tools

Register as M365 Copilot Declarative Agent

1. Start the MCP server (npm start)

2. In the M365 Copilot admin or Teams Developer Portal, create a new declarative agent

3. Point it to the declarative-agent.json manifest in this directory

4. The manifest references http://localhost:3001/sse as the MCP server endpoint

5. For production, deploy the server and update the URL accordingly

Testing in Copilot

Once registered, try these prompts:

• "Show me a dashboard of all active projects" → Job dashboard with cards and budget bars

• "Which jobs are over budget?" → Filtered list highlighting Cascade Office Tower

• "Show the cost breakdown for the Downtown Transit Hub" → Donut chart of cost categories

• "What's the cash flow forecast for Cascade Office Tower?" → Line chart with planned/actual/forecast

• "List all pending change orders across projects" → Interactive table filtered to Pending

• "Compare budget vs actual for all projects" → Grouped bar chart

• "Give me the cost code detail for the bridge retrofit" → Budget vs actual bars by CSI code

Sample Data

The server includes realistic data for 6 construction projects totaling ~$113.6M in contract value:

12 change orders, 8 subcontractors, monthly cash flow data, and CSI-format cost codes per job.

License

Internal proof-of-concept — not for production use.