The Problem:
Mass Foam Systems wanted to utilise a grant scheme that was approaching soon but the problem they face was that this would overload their current processes of being able to book jobs.
Mass Foam Systems used pen and paper to schedule jobs in and all work was delegated to 1 man. This meant that if the book was lost or misplaced for a certain time period. All the vans would not know what jobs they need to do and a lot of business would be lost. This was their single point of failure.
The Solution:
The solution comprised of a web-based application that had the ability to log in as a user with either full permissions and restricted access and allow the user to books, view and manage jobs with a calendar styled system.
The reason why a custom solution was built rather than utilising an existing calendar application was due to the restricted permissions that were required to protect customer information from certain users.
This application was to be used by all Mass Foam Systems employees as well as external outreach teams. It would be a huge breach of data privacy if customer information was shared from one company to another without the customer being aware of this taking place.
The solution utilised AWS Cognito as a user management system which would allow us to restrict certain users based on pre-defined permissions meaning the application would only show the required non-sensitive information to certain people whilst the owners of the job booking (the user who initially created the job) will maintain full access and permissions over said job booking.
ReactJS was utilised along with GraphQL to allow for real-time updates to job bookings meaning that multiple users will see the bookings be booked as and when they are.
Developing a custom application for a client requires in-depth knowledge of multiple technologies. Knowing this information is vital to building an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost-effective application. The technologies used in this stack allowed for a cloud-based application that has minimal costs of around £2/month (inc. usage & hosting).
This solution ultimately allowed Mass Foam Systems to efficiently book and manage jobs on a secure and reliable custom made application which is now white-labelled as Mass Foam System’ own creation.
