Building a Digital Construction Platform for a U.S. Technology Vendor

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 that comprises several products. They approached SPD Group 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 automates the business processes of the various construction project stakeholders, including construction materials producers and suppliers, construction 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 to us the end-to-end development of two of the three products their platform consists of. Additionally, we’ve also augmented their in-house project team, engaged in developing the rest of the company’s platform.

Initially, the client engaged us to develop an e-Ticketing product that allows construction materials’ producers and suppliers and their clients to share sales- and delivery-related data in real time. The product eliminates a great deal of paperwork and makes it a great deal easier to locate tickets.

The second of the client’s products we’ve been engaged in developing constitutes the bulk of our involvement in the project under review. The product represents a comprehensive Web and mobile solution that empowers the buyers and suppliers of building materials with various insights they can generate based on current and historical data. For example, it is possible to aggregate data by customer and display the items and product amounts they’ve purchased by date or for a predefined time period. The user can also display all the clients in a selected area and the purchases they’ve made, indicating the item purchased, their amount, and purchase date. In total, the application allows building more than 20 different charts for various stats that can then be used for analytical and forecasting purposes.

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

SPD Group 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 the client, and they were very satisfied with the solution we delivered. Furthermore, the newly developed product helped the client attract more investors and expand their customer base. As a result, the company requested us to develop a larger-scale and a great deal more complex product that was also to become part of the company’s digital construction platform.

We started by discussing the requirements with the client’s Product and Engineering Managers, jointly finding the best possible approaches and implementation options. We designed and built the software architecture for the solution the client afterwards decided to use in the rest of their software products by re-engineering them accordingly.

Implementing some of the product’s functionality took us a considerable additional effort. More partcularly, we’ve more than once had to optimize the application’s database functionality 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 system’s functionality, developed by our predecessors in order to improve its performance.

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

Technical Solution

SPD Group’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 and have efficiently been supporting the significant growth of the company’s customer base.

The high quality of the client’s first product we have ensured has helped them draw the investment they needed and acquire more clients.
The software architecture our project team came up with for the client’s second product has proven to be a great solution they’ve decided to implement in their other previously developed products.