Mobile Enablement of an International Standards Provider

Challenge:
ASTM International is a globally recognized leader in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards. Today, some 12,000 ASTM standards are used around the world to improve product quality, enhance safety, facilitate market access and trade, and build consumer confidence.
ASTM’s field inspection system was a manual, fragmented pen and paper process involving printing of client specific standards and inspection worksheets, collection of inspection data, and reentry/reconciliation of the inspection data into the system after the inspection tour and reporting of inspection results.
In order to improve the speed, productivity and quality of field inspection projects, ASTM required an Enterprise Mobility Solution that enabled seamless communication between inspectors and the inspection system.

Solution:
Alliance created a cutting-edge enterprise mobility solution extensible for other application areas.
Phase 1 leveraged Alliance’s JumpStart solution: 

  • Elicited and elaborated a detailed set of requirements
  • Developed prototype for both Inspector’s Workstation and Administrator’s Workstation
  • Finalized the architecture for full scale system

Phase 2 leveraged Alliance’s modified Agile Development approach and developed the two distinct components

  • Inspector Workstation (Tablet application)  - thick client application with innovative user interface, enables inspectors to conduct their inspections, compile final reports, and submit their information to the central application server
  • The Administrator Workstation - thin client application that allows administrators to create new inspection worksheets, view completed inspections, and initiate the transfer of data to and from the database

Impact:

  • Improved speed and accuracy of the field inspection engagements
  • Improved productivity of the field inspectors
  • Consistency across inspection worksheets through seamless data exchange between client and admin applications

Technologies:

  • Windows 7 Ruggedized Tablets
  • WPF & WCF on .NET 4.0
  • Microsoft Synch Framework 2.1
  • PRISM framework using MVVM and ASP. Net MVC 3.0, Razor
  • SQL Server CE DB, Oracle 11g

Key architectural facets:

  • Microsoft Synch Framework to ensure seamless data exchange
  • Occasionally connected architecture to support the isolated mode
  • Ability to draw sketches, click photos and attach to the inspection responses
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Mobile Enablement of an International Standards Provider