Case Study: Digital Construction Platform Development

Summary

Industry: Logistics, Construction, and Building Materials’ Production.
Location: the U.S.
Project duration: September, 2020 – ongoing.
Size of the project team: 5-24 experts.
Software product: 4 (2 Web and 2 mobile) custom applications.
Expertise delivered: Product Development, Software Architecture Design, UI/UX Design, Custom Software Development (Web, mobile).

Challenge

A U.S. technology vendor, dedicated to digitizing various agencies’ construction delivery processes, was looking for assistance in expanding their mission-critical software platform. They approached SPD Technology through a referral by a former client of ours, who was well-familiar with our software product development competencies and skills.

The client’s system is a comprehensive construction delivery platform that сonsists of several software products. The application automates the business processes of the various construction project stakeholders, including construction materials’ producers and suppliers, general contractors, and state transportation agencies. The products that make up the platform efficiently connect these project stakeholders and enable efficient interactions between them.

The client entrusted us with developing two of the three of the software products their platform includes. Besides, we’ve also augmented their in-house team that develops the rest of the company’s platform.

Initially, we were engaged to develop an e-Ticketing application. This product allows construction materials’ manufacturers and suppliers and their clients to share sales- and delivery-related data in real time. It eliminates a great deal of paperwork and makes it much easier to locate tickets.

The second of the client’s products accounts for the bulk of our involvement in the project under review. This product is a comprehensive Web and mobile solution for buyers and suppliers of building materials. The application empowers these market players with various insights they can derive from both current and historical data.

For example, it is possible to aggregate data by customer, or display the items and product amounts a customer has purchased by date or for a specified time period. Also, the user can display all clients in a selected area and the purchases these clients have made. The latter includes the items purchased, product amounts, and purchase date. In total, the application allows building more than 20 different charts for various stats. One can use these charts for analytical and forecasting purposes.

Additionally, the application serves as an industry database for the Construction and Building materials verticals. It makes it easy to source construction materials, their manufacturers and suppliers, as well as various related products. The mobile version of the application provides access to the full range of its Web version’s functionality.

SPD Technology was responsible for developing both of the client’s products from the ground up.

Solution

At the beginning of the project, we formed a project team that consisted of a Project Manager, 1 Solution Architect, 1 Backend developer, 1 Frontend developer, and 1 QA engineer. Later in the project, the number of our employees grew and peaked at a total of 24 software developers and other experts.

It took us around half a year to develop the e-Ticketing product for our client. They were very satisfied with the solution we delivered. Furthermore, this solution helped them attract more investors and expand their customer base. As a result, the company requested us to develop a larger-scale and much more complex product that was going to become part of the client’s digital construction platform too.

We started by discussing the project requirements with the client’s Product and Engineering Managers and determined the best  approaches and implementation options jointly with them. Our experts designed and built the software architecture for the solution. Afterwards, the client decided to implement this architecture in the rest of their software products by re-engineering them accordingly.

Implementing some of the functionality took us a considerable additional effort. More particularly, we’ve more than once had to optimize the application’s database for response time by modifying its architecture. This has allowed us to cut the response time for some of the database queries several-fold. Also, our experts have re-engineered a considerable part of the functionality developed by our predecessors in order to improve its performance.

As of March, 2023, SPD Technology’s project team has developed the bulk of the functionality of the client’s product and currently continues to expand the solution. We are also helping onboard new clients by creating the required customizations.

Technical Solution

SPD Technology’s project team has been using the following tech stack to implement the project:

• AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, RDS PostreSQL, AppSync, etc).
• Terraform
• Circle CI
• GraphQL
• REST
• Auth0
• Java 11
• Quarkus
• GraalVM
• Gradle
• Ruby
• Ruby-on-Rails
• Rspec
• JS
• MiniTest
• Heroku
• Git
• Bootstrap4
• HAML/Slim
• Newman

Result

The client has received two robust and well-performing software products that constitute an essential part of their digital construction platform. These products have efficiently been supporting the significant growth of the company’s customer base.

The high quality of the first product we have developed has helped the client draw the investment they needed and acquire more customers.

The software architecture we came up with for the client’s second product has proven to be a great solution the client has decided to implement in their previously developed products.