A scalable, custom software solution for a utilities product manufacturer

Steve Vick is a highly accredited product manufacturer in the utilities sector 

Steve Vick International approached Blue Frontier to support with the development of their SMARTester™ software. SMARTester™ is a highly accurate wireless gas pressure tester designed to transmit data to a mobile device e.g. a smartphone, tablet or laptop. The purpose of the device is to report accurate, real-time gas pressure tests back to a centralised cloud database that stores, aggregates and visualises the data to ensure that the tested gas meters are performing to the expected levels.   
 
Blue Frontier supported with the creation of a mobile app that connects to the SMARTester™ device to allow field engineers to collate and transmit gas pressure test results accurately and in real-time. We also supported with the creation of the SMARTester™ cloud-based portal and the development of a custom API that connects the 2 systems. We currently provide ongoing product support for both SMARTester™ systems. 

Steve Vick came to us with a number of specific requirements that the solution needed to encompass. The dedicated product owner working on the project worked closely with the client and the relevant specialists to gather requirements and create a solution that was achievable, scalable and reliable.  
 
Both the app and the portal had slightly different requirements that we had to take into consideration. One of the main requirements for the mobile app was offline capability, to allow field engineers to take readings in remote areas where they may not have a reliable internet connection. We designed the app to store data locally if an internet connection is not available and then sync all collected data when the internet connection is restored.  
 
The most important requirement for the portal was that it needed to be able to store, aggregate and visualise large amounts of data. Each test a field engineer carries out could result in approximately 150 data points that need to be correctly stored within the portal. Over the years this has resulted in approximately 1.5 billion data points being stored within the database. Not only did the coding of the portal need to be reliable, so did the cloud architecture we created to host the portal.    
 
The final main requirement we needed to consider was developing an API that was capable handling spikes in traffic at peak times of the day but uploading the data to the portal in a sequential format.  
 
After understanding the requirements from the client, the dedicated product owner and technical specialists proposed a tech stack using React Native for the mobile app, React for the portal, Ruby on Rails for the API and AWS for the hosting.