Web App - Job Management System
A custom-built web application that allows job contractors to connect with and allocate jobs to the executives.
Overview
The proposed application by the client was a website portal that allowed receipt of job orders and creation of dedicated tasks for allocation. The client, a major subcontractor for the New South Wales Housing Board, faced several shortcomings in handling a large number of maintenance requests and allocating them to the taskforce. The new portal allowed the client to receive work orders from customers in multiple formats such as PDFs and emails and automate the process of job creation and management.
Core Features
- A homepage with a welcome message and login functionality that allows individual users to access their accounts.
- Automatic creation of work orders by sorting through PDFs and emails.
- Option to assign work orders individually to technicians or in bulk by uploading them from excel.
- Track the activity of the team of technicians with Google maps.
- Receive a voice confirmation from the technician on completion of the task.
- Receive rates from excel files and compute the amount to be charged to the client based on preset conditions.
- Create invoices and track payments.
- Generate reports such as technician productivity and client outstanding payment reports for admin perusal.
Challenges
The main challenge lay in the fact that the solution had to be developed from scratch with no prior parallel on the market. In the developmental aspects, the following challenges lay ahead of our development team.
- Devising a method to capture work orders over various formats such as email and PDF and processing them to create work orders.
- Bringing in an organizational paradigm to ensure accurate sorting of a large volume of work order files before processing.
- Overcoming the limitations such as human errors, overlooked jobs, and delays caused by manual handling of a large number of work orders.
- Creating a proper mechanism to efficiently track and report the status of each work order and ensure client satisfaction.
- Streamlining job order status update and achieving better data handling and reporting.
Solutions
The requirements of the client were thoroughly analyzed and the team took up the task of developing a portal that was tailor-made as per the specifications. The following solutions were proposed as a part of the portal and developed successfully:
- Creating a scheduler that periodically scans Microsoft Outlook to capture PDF and email body text to identify any tickets and convert them into work orders.
- Developing a robust, high-performance web application on the ASP.NET MVC 4.5 to sift through and analyze the created work orders and assign them to technicians. Provide a client-side dashboard to view work order status, raise invoice and receive payments.
- Overcoming the limitations caused by manual handling of a large number of work orders by developing dedicated Android and iOS applications for technicians. These apps allow technicians to receive work orders and report their status with ease.
- Developing a proper job status reporting mechanism by incorporating features such as Audio recording and photograph attachment which allows technicians to report the completion of a task in a verifiable manner.
- Relaying the job status to the application and using WCF services to handle and update all the media content on the web platform.
Result
Our product allowed the client to simplify the job order mechanism. It also made it easy for the client to process a heavy load of daily work orders on different formats and convert them into clear job orders for the technicians. The efficiency of the process helped the client reduce dependency on manual handling and automated the process.
ROI
The client was able to significantly cut down manpower costs, notice a dramatic increase in productivity, achieved a streamlined work process that minimized errors, ensured maximum customer satisfaction and witnessed a substantial increase in revenues.