Commercial

BRENCO

Brenco is a Woman Owned Class-A General Contracting company that prides themselves on their excellent workmanship, competitive rates, and delivering outstanding results. The company’s overarching goal is to build lasting partnerships with clients through exceptional service. To do so, the Brenco team partnered with us at Mobomo to develop a project management application that would increase efficiency of their projects by providing real-time updates.

brenco

Brenco is a Woman Owned Class-A General Contracting company that prides themselves on their excellent workmanship, competitive rates, and delivering outstanding results. The company’s overarching goal is to build lasting partnerships with clients through exceptional service. To do so, the Brenco team partnered with us at Mobomo to develop a project management application that would increase efficiency of their projects by providing real-time updates.

brenco

APPROACH.

The main goal was to change the operation flow for a contracting company to include up-to-date technology and to reduce the amount of time spent on the phone in general for the company. This, in turn, would add more time for employees to focus on completing orders and maintaining productivity. The Brenco team also wanted this to include the ability to use a web portal to view order documentation.

In order to accomplish these goals, Mobomo used an agile methodology. This was chosen due to the number of individuals involved in the process. Daily scrum meetings, weekly status meetings, and various checkpoint meetings were exercised in order to efficiently develop the product. The people involved in 1 or more of these types of meetings include the front-end developers, mobile developers, backend developers, project manager, client point of contact, client accounting team, client CEO. A modified form of agile was performed in the early stages of the project to account for the client's previous methodologies of development.

INFRASTRUCTURE.

We use AWS as our hosting partner and are using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is an IaaS (infrastructure as service) to host our web application. Our application servers are Linux OS-based. We are using Amazon RDS, which is a SaaS (software as a service) that provides a full-featured relational database hosted entirely on the Amazon infrastructure. We are using the Amazon S3 service for storing and retrieving the static files with advanced features including versioning, lifecycle policies, etc.

brenco
brenco

TECH STACK.

  • iOS - Language: Swift 5, IDE: XCode, Major services used: Apple Maps, Google Directions, OS: macOS Catalina
  • Android - Language: Kotlin, IDE: Android Studio, Major services used: Google Maps, Google Directions API, OS: Ubuntu
  • Web - Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, PostgreSQL: 9.6.x, Ruby/Rails: 2.5.3 / 5.2.1
  • AWS Services - S3, SMTP, SES, SNS, EC2
  • Third Party Integration - Google Maps API (Location capturing), QuickBooks (invoicing, payments), WeatherWorks, SendGrid, Docusign, Sitefoto

CHALLENGES.

During the planning stages of the project, one of the most apparent challenges was the fact that complexities of additions were not initially explored. Essentially, the first portion of the project that was planned was a fully functional mobile app for completing orders and a web portal to display that order information, user information, and work site information. This should be considered the minimum viable product (MVP). When developing the additional capabilities, the phases have included an agile methodology of sprint planning to incorporate additional features to the system, allowing each feature to go through the full process of discovery, design, development and testing.

Additionally, challenges occurred during development were also related to the identification of official requirements for the additional capabilities that have been explored and developed. The issues related to this were expected, as their integration into the system often times has needed revision after individual capability completion. An unforeseen challenge that came about was related to this the end user's preferences and ability to complete tasks in the field. Group training sessions were required in order to obtain their viewpoint and account for it when developing an efficient product.

Here is a list of the additional capabilities that have been planned and/or executed since MVP to date: Order Reporting, Custom Reporting, User Details - Last Accessed Info, Accounting - Invoicing & POs, Quotes & Estimates, Settings Additions - Imports, Work Types, Work Site Types, State Taxes, Instructions, Damages Recipients, Content Management System (CMS) User Interface customizations.

brenco
brenco

SOLUTIONS.

After understanding the requirements, we identified a set of user roles and applications needed for each user role to satisfy the client’s requirements.

We proposed a combination of web and mobile apps to meet the requirements. The cloud-based web app is developed in a multi-tenant kind of architecture where different companies can register themselves and make use of our services from a single-hosted solution. The mobile application consumes the APIs exposed by the back end. The mobile applications support offline working, as the contractors might be working from remote areas.

RESULT.

The MVP included a mobile app (iOS and Android) and a web admin portal, which was delivered in December of 2018 with the basic set of features. This product was then used by the contractors to replace their old methodology for documenting work done. We then worked on the feedback provided by the users, and we combined that with an advanced set of new functionalities to develop version 2.0. Since that release, we have had multiple iterations on version 2.0, each of which containing app enhancements and UX improvements.

Version 2.0 was not the end of the development cycle for this product. Later on, newer features have been integrated, such as quotes, estimates, and invoicing. These additions have transformed the product into a complete project management tool for contracting companies.

The latest version of mobile apps submitted to their respective stores is 3.1.3, which was last updated in June of 2020. Since that time frame, we have continued to work on additional features for the admin portal specifically, with new features still in the pipeline.

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brenco
brenco
brenco
brenco
brenco

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