The Business Challenge
A foodservice company provides equipment repair services to businesses. Their parent company owns several small to medium-sized service companies, and these companies have been integrated into a common ERP system. They approached Incuvation with a need to enhance their communication and service offering to their clients by sending e-mail alerts when certain events happened, such as creating a new service order, or when technician was on their way to their place of business.
Solution Considerations
While evaluating their situation, some key considerations came up:
The marketing department was using SendGrid, and wanted the solution to use that to send messages, and later text messages.
The ERP system had separate instances for different sister companies, with subtle differences, such as fields or time zones
A mobile application was being developed by an outside company, and this application would need to consume the same data
Technical Design
The Solution, called TekTrak, was recommended and implemented:
Incuvation's Glu Windows Service was implemented and polls each of the ERP systems on a regular basis and extracts changes made pertinent to customer alerts
A SQL database was designed to hold the service orders and alerts sent to customers pulled from the ERP. This provided a consistent design surface to program to.
A web interface was developed using Microsoft Blazor, that provides employees with a means to monitor the alerts that have been sent or are pending.
Daily reports are e-mailed to key stakeholders with statistics on the messages that were sent the day before. This information is used to provide a measurement into how well TekTrak is doing, and how many customers are signed up to receive the messages.
An API was written in ASP.NET 5 that allows the team developing the mobile application to extract the data from one location, rather than many different ERP databases.
Solution's Impact on the Business
Customers appreciate the communication letting them know that the technician has been dispatched
Emails give customers a touchpoint where they can be encouraged to use the service in the future, or potentially purchase products
The API saved the outside development team from having to pull data from many different sources, saving money and potentially bogging down those systems