Built a Unified Software Platform for a Fortune 100 Technology

Company

Our client, a Fortune 100 technology company, wanted to integrate the products of a newly acquired

firm in their platform using IoT as a core of connecting all the devices intended to measure

compliance parameters for physical assets in capital-intensive industries. HashedIn developed an IoT

focused product to monitor, manage and track on-ground equipment for safety, compliance and

efficiency.

Executive Summary

Problem StatementOur client is a Fortune 100 technology company operating in Utilities and Industrial segment globally. They had recently acquired a hardware company having a product portfolio targeted for managing and monitoring physical assets.

The key challenge for our client was integrating these devices with their software and enable them to interact with each other for better monitoring, safety, and management. This would have empowered their customers to work across locations as the data will be in a single database accessible anywhere anytime for analytics and export. Having said that, the hurdle lay in a large quantum of data to be processed requiring a system capable to handle various commands.

The product suite was as below:Device Management: 3 variants, one each for Fleet Manager, Line Managers and Top ManagementMonitoring: 2 variants, both for Location Manager and Top Management

Business RequirementsEnd ObjectiveThe solution intended to be developed was targeted at Oil and Gas industry. In a nutshell, our client required a Unified Gas Safety Solution.

Key RequirementsSummarized requirements put forth by client were as below:The key tenets of this solution were:

Standard features○ Provides basic instrument management functions○ Free of charge for the customer; distributed on CD and through web download○ On-premise deployment

Advanced features○ Provides different application modules for different needs○ Pricing based on application modules○ Customer flexibility to pick and choose application modules○ Supports on-premise and SaaS deployment, models○ Better user-friendliness

Summarized requirements put forth by client were as below:Create and Manage Customers - includes creating & managing Customer Organization, its associated sites, and their associated ZonesManage the system inventory which includes the gateway’s, various static and mobile gas detectorsMonitor the sites using the gas detectors in near real time and non-real time modes

Impact and involvement of stakeholders

Unification of gas safety solution also involved bringing all the stakeholders under a single interface hence solution had to provide value to each of them involved:

Operation Managers - MInimize cost, protect assets, limit liabilitiesSafety Managers - Promote safety, prevent accidents, stay compliantIndustrial Hygienists - Prevent acute health issues along with any long-term chronic health issuesEmergency Responders- Faster response, create situation awareness, minimize damageEnvironmentalists - Limit leaks footprint, mitigate fugitive emissions Channel Partners - Acquire customers, provide customer service, support logistics

Our Solution Structure

USP (United Software Platform) is a SaaS offering support to multiple categories of customer types customer instances (organizations).

USP users have broadly 2 categories of customer types1. Freemium - these are customers who have the client’s previous gas detection devices and have

not procured the USP services. These customers are allowed to manage a limited number of devices and persist a limited amount of data (Device Logs and Gateway Logs)

2. Paid - these are the customers who have purchased the USP services - currently, there is no further categorization of these services (for e.g. Silver, Gold, Platinum etc.)

Two different instances, one for freemium and another premium, of the USP service would be run on the cluster and "Service Fabric Placement Constraints" will be used to place the services on appropriate nodes.

The services involved in this solution include, but not limited to:1. Customer Management2. Device Management3. User Management4. Product Catalog

Solution Approach

Provide a dashboard to view the status of various detection devices and the associated workersProvide management reports for efficient tracking of device compliance to safety parameters

Solution Dynamics and InteractionsThe USP Application was built on top of Sentience IoT platform. The Domain logic and the User interaction was managed by USP. It leverages the Sentience platform for User Management, Device Management, telemetry ingestion, data persistence, analytics, & security.

USP will interact with the Sentence using the well-defined REST APIs exposed as part of Sentience platform. USP gets the gateway/device configuration using the IoT Hub. The device telemetry is also delivered using the IoT hub.

The IoT hub is abstracted by Sentience. Sentience provides a wrapper service called annotation stream to address the gateways. Sentience also provides an SDK that can be used by the gateway to connect to the annotation stream. This SDK simplifies the communication with the IoT hub and also takes into consideration some of the IoT platform principles and security aspects.

USP customers consume the above mentioned services using an API Gateway Service. The API gateway abstracts the services and orchestrates the invocation to the different domain services. The API Gateway also manages the authorization of the various actors that access the system. The API gateway would interact with the Authorization framework provided by Sentience.

User InterfaceKey aspects of the USP Web App UI:

The application is hosted on the IIS server, as a .NET MVC applicationThe UI is building over popular UI libraries ReactJS, Redux (to manage client-side store), React-Router (for navigation), Bootstrap (for styling & customized for USP)UI code bundling is done using WebpackSignalR is being used for the Push Notification to the clients.

Following was the UI development process:The UI local development is primarily happening on the NodeJS server.Using web pack, the final distributable are created and pushed into the /static directory in the .NET project codebase.The .NET application is hosted on the cloud and UI assets, JS are served from the /static directory, that's part of the .NET project

Technology StackBack end: Java, .Net, C, C#Front end: Angular, React and Redux

Business Outcomes

Our client expanded its scope to a plethora of industries like Oil and Gas, Police and military, Utilities, Pulp/Paper production, Printing, Semiconductor, Steel, Construction, Industrial, Chemicals Petroleum, Marine, and Mining credits to its scalability and stability.

The product was delivered on time reaping following benefits:A user-friendly UI to configure and manage the devicesImproved safety for the workersSustained revenue generation with SaaSA faster and improved version to handle triggering of commands for the devicesReduced maintenance through streamlined Firmware ManagementSave time with one-click data download for all instrument data

HashedIn has helped many promising firms across the globe by building customized solutions to give the users a completely hassle-free experience. Kindly let us know if you

have any specific problem/use case, where we can provide more information or consult you.

https://hashedin.com/contact-us/