Client Overview
US based manufacturer that produces heating, cooling, water heating, pool/spa heating and commercial refrigeration products
Business Challenge
Customer was looking for Mobile and Cloud services provider for the enhancement of existing mobile app as well as cloud migration
- Existing Mobile App Concerns
- Poor-quality mobile app: multiple crashes, critical bugs, usability issues
- End-user complaints: no visibility regarding resolving issues in terms of technical solution as well as timeline
- Frequent server disconnects
- Issues in provisioning App with HVAC, water heater and many other end devices
- Customization
- Migration from generic cloud platform to IoT specific cloud platform
- Integrate voice-activated control with existing devices using Alexa smart home and Google Home
- Web Portals
- Require multiple portals for reducing dependency on development team and pass on the responsibility to company employees, based on the departments
VOLANSYS Contribution
- Resolved issues in heater provision within one week
- Optimization – modification in the order of steps executed in provisioning flow
- Modifications in the application (Android, iOS):
- Ongoing App sustenance engineering and customer support
- Revamp Mobile App with better UI/UX and features enhancements:
- Set Point Adjustment (For water heater temperature)
- Indicators:
- Running: indicates that the water is being heated
- Vacation: indicates that the set point is at 65 degree
- Enable/Disable: to heat water
- Notification & Alerts
- Notify the state of the valve
- Alert for checking the water heater
- Usage Report
- Daily/Monthly/Yearly
- Graphical/Text
- New features implementation: Intelligent gas water heater – controlling all the thermostats using a single master device or mobile app
- Migrating from Generic AWS cloud to IoT specific cloud platform
- Collaboration and development on new cloud
- Solved the issue of polling (Real-time updates from device to cloud to mobile app now) which was not possible with existing Cloud
- Transform and migrate legacy application and databases for the cloud
- MQTT support with faster response and throughput, and lower battery and bandwidth usage
- Dynamic configuration (new product can be added in system just by setting their configurations
- Scalability was an issue in existing cloud which needed to be addressed in new cloud
- Support for voice-enabled control:
- Google Home
- Amazon Alexa (Certified with WWA Badge- Smart Home Skills)
-
Developed web portal for end users and other portals for internal use for maintenance of the whole system using Angular.js & React.js
- End-to-end Quality Testing with Volanium test automation framework suite and python based Robot framework
- IoT device testing – Edge Device, Sensor, Gateway
- Mobile application testing
- Cloud testing
Solution Architecture
Benefits Delivered
- Rapid Turn Around Time
- Resolved issues in heater provision within 7 days
- Reduced average customer complaints
- Faster time to Market
- Completed cloud migration in just 4-5 months
- Improved customer comfort with voice activated solution
- Process Optimization
- Integration to Jira and GitHub for release management
- Streamline Operations
- Collaboration with three different teams working at different places and time zones putting best project management practices
- Cost effective
- Since the older cloud was not scalable and resource hungry, we delivered micro services architecture enabled cost effective cloud solution
- Executed dynamic UI in mob app allowing changes to be implemented directly from cloud reducing 6 weeks development and QA cycle to publish any application update onto stores