The advent of internet-enabled mobile devices has presented an unprecedented opportunity of growth to businesses of all scale and size. From creating a flexible, remote working environment to real-time tracking of products and services, mobile has revolutionized the way enterprise work. Today mobile technology is being used to enhance productivity and efficiency across the business.

Unlike the early days, enterprise mobility is no longer limited to being a network of centrally connected devices. Enterprise mobility benefits are now being leveraged at multi-dimensional levels for improving business across domains, systems, and practices. One such business domain is enterprise asset management or EAM.

EAM refers to maintaining an organization’s physical assets as it helps to improve their usability, quality, and efficiency while ensuring safety. In the past, software applications were used to optimize maintenance activities. However, mobile promises greater flexibility, scalability, and optimization for EAM over traditional web-based desktop solutions.

The Client Requirements: An Overview

The client has been providing web-based EAM solutions to a range of asset-intensive industries like mining, government institutions, etc. The client’s existing EAM creates workflows based on single or multiple asset data resources. These workflows are subsequently modified and optimized for creating new assets or improving life cycle parameters of old ones. The client required a mobile solution that was similar to the existing web-based solution in both design and features.

The Key Challenges

The primary challenge was to deliver a user experience that was in line with clients current EAM framework. While the clients EAM was desktop-driven, our EAM solution had to be designed to be compatible and executable across handheld devices of different sizes. The mobile interface also had to offer users with dynamic capabilities, including:

• Tools to create custom workflows.
• OS compatibility.
• Create workflows for assets spread across different time zones.
• Offline and Online Data sync capabilities.
• Seamless integration of mobile data with the central web server.

In addition to this, there were some business challenges as well. The PSI team had to ensure a substantial ROI in comparison to the existing solution. Mobility solution also needed to be leak proof due to the sheer amount of data the business had to handle on a day to day basis. Hence, all business risk factors had to be considered for existing as well as fresh workflows.

The Solution Approach

PSI adopted an agile development approach to adhere to delivery timelines as well as evaluate business risks easily. The agile approach also helped accommodate change requests consistently without lagging behind.

The Technical Highlights

Agile Sprints were designed by the team, which was led by a certified-Scrum-Master. Daily Scrum meeting was organized for monitoring development progress. The faults were identified, reported, and resolved regularly to ensure effectiveness. The PSI team worked on SQLite structure for asset data management and creating efficient workflows.

Here are some key highlights of the development stage:

• Xamarin cross-platform capabilities for creating shared business logic for different devices.
• For Windows OS, the team built business logic using the latest Windows 10 framework.
• Xamarin Test Cloud environment was used to create automated test runs

The Solution Delivery

The PSI team adopted a hybrid model for delivering the custom EAM solution. The client worked from onsite while our team deployed the solution remotely. This approach ensured that the solutions were delivered on time.

The agile methodology and hybrid model helped deliver a 360° Mobile Solution for Asset Visibility and Traceability. The client was able to successfully acquire two customers at the initial phase itself. PSI team, despite the limitations, was able to deliver custom EAM solutions to the client within crunched timelines.

We have an expert team of designers, developers, and solution architects that can work for unfamiliar domains team. If you want also want a mobility solution for your business, we can assist you. Our enterprise mobility solutions have helped introduce greater accountability, efficiency, and productivity across business domains and workflows. Contact us for more on enterprise mobility services.