E.ON Mobile maintenence portal

The mPUD mobile application provides the ability to manage and organize work orders for technicians to monitor equipment status during power distribution.

E.ON is a leading Czech supplier of electricity and gas to consumers. We implemented a complete rewrite of their existing mobile application for internal employees, by which technicians can organize work orders and perform individual inspections of electrical distribution networks and their equipment.

We processed the application interface in accordance with E.ON’s graphics manual.

Client assignment

E.ON decided to redesign their original application, mainly due to its user unreliability and frequent data loss during transmission.

From the UX point of view, the application was non-intuitive and the graphic interface did not meet current standards.

Furthermore, the application’s original development was carried out for a specific model of tablet, which no longer has satisfactory parameters in terms of performance, speed, and battery life.

The client requested a complete redesign of the application and its synchronization with the company’s long-term efforts to digitize systems.

It was therefore essential for us to rewrite the existing application and implement it on the Android platform.

With this rewrite, the client expected an improvement in the application’s operation in order to meet the condition of reliable transfer of data acquired from the technician to the mobile backend.

Development of the solution

We implemented the project in FTFP (Fixed Time Fixed Price) mode, and planned it in standard project phases: preparatory and analytical, implementation, and testing. As part of the implementation phase, we integrated the new solution into the existing solution.

We could not make backend modifications because, during development, the old application had to remain fully operational.

Part of the delivered solution was a complete redesign of the application, which we implemented in accordance with Android’s mobile platform recommendations and E.ON’s company standards.

Part of the implementation was the administration of commands prepared by E.ON coordinators. The commands were further synchronized with the backend.

These work orders are also linked to fault detection, malfunction, and measurement functions acquired by technicians during inspections of high or low voltage equipment during scheduled activities.

The acquired functions can be synchronized back to the backend by the user on request. The data transfer also includes binary data: photographs, which have a high added value for the customer because, according to these, the condition of the equipment can be identified.

Result

The application enables the coordinator to complete and close the entire work order process on the backend.

Because we were rewriting an existing solution, we had to copy the configured processes into the existing platform. As part of the optimization, another phase of process improvement is being considered to meet the needs of technicians and minimize data transfers.

Incremental synchronization is being planned for this phase. However, we must first implement this on the backend, and it must be in line with the basic premise we proposed at the beginning of the project: minimization and security of data transfer to the backend.

The implementation of the mobile application was specially developed for Samsung Tab Active 2 devices supporting Android 8.1. We developed the application in Kotlin using the principles of Clean Architecture.

Finally, we integrated the application into the existing system, including the mobile backend and identity management.