Intuitive Frontend Development of a Maritime Forecasting Tool for Improved Offshore Accessibility & Safety
Expertise Delivered
Industry
Our client,
Acme Corporation builds Artificial Intelligence solutions to help solve some of the biggest challenges in the energy sector relating to the distribution of renewable energy and conventional power.
Their next-generation technologies solve the problem of extracting & realizing meaningful insights to transform O&M from the large amounts of data available across the energy complex. They are a value-driven partner for energy and industrial IoT with seven different products aimed at many use cases.
Disclaimer: The name ‘Acme Corporation’ is a placeholder, as there is an NDA signed between both parties.
Challenge
Acme Corporation’s product ‘Ripples’ offers an accurate and localized assessment of environmental risk assessments through a combination of metocean data with vessel-tracking data. With high accuracy forecasting, Ripples aims to assist and improve the management of one of the riskiest aspects of offshore accessibility - safe crew transfers and enhanced accessibility.
With IoT devices placed on multiple turbines and offshore wind farms, the data points collected help accurately forecast the best time for safe ocean transfers.
Acme Corporation was looking to revamp Ripples (mainly frontend with a couple of changes in the backend) with an improved UI - one that leveraged and showcased the data adequately and shared insights for data-driven decision making, as well as continuous monitoring.
Solution
Acme’s search for an experienced and reliable product development partner came to an end when they came across Maruti Techlabs via our outreach.
Maruti Techlabs took on revamping Ripples’ frontend, while Acme took ownership of backend development. To scale faster and reduce the time to market, they decided to distribute the work across both teams.
Acme opted for our “try before you buy” model as part of the evaluation process, where we delivered one sprint’s worth of work for assessment. The evaluation was carried out against other providers and developers from platforms such as Toptal. The tasks for one sprint were picked from Acme’s frontend backlog.
Throughout the trial and overall engagement, what worked in our favor was our communication, stakeholder management, on-time quality development, testing process, and seamless integration with their back-end development team.
Both Acme and Maruti Techlabs outlined the product roadmap and deliverables on Jira across sprints, with relevant user stories. This was followed by collating different UI/UX designs from Figma within the user stories while simultaneously identifying timelines to achieve them.
Subsequently, the Maruti Techlabs team went further in-depth with each iteration and ensured that the deliverables were bug-free before sharing with Acme by spearheading QA.
Our team of engineers developed a responsive web application that can be accommodated on iPad, phone, or web to forecast better accessibility and crew safety accurately. A crucial part of development included the removal of manually fetching the data from different disparate systems.
The dashboard now gets automatically populated with the latest updates from the backend systems. It gives insights into analytics and data in various formats such as graphs, charts, and maps. With easy access to the latest data, Acme’s clients could now easily decide whether or not to send technicians offshore to wind turbines.
Some of the features in the dashboard include :
- Feedback Logbook - Insights on whether the transfer was a success or cancelled, along with the date of transfer, turbine, and vessel details.
- Map Dashboard - LIVE visual map of the turbines with daily details such as Met Mast, temperature, wave height, and current signal.
- Daily Control Panel - A regularly updated dashboard that helps make the daily decisions for safe ocean transfers with insights on storm risk, wind speed, wave height, and more.
- Location Accessibility - A graphical representation of the number of hours a site was accessible and the number of spare hours.
- User Navigation - A login screen.
- Admin User Governance - A list of all users with their following details - role, email, phone, and status.
- System Precision - Forecasting system’s accuracy up to 5 days ahead.
- Alerts - Notification regarding daily forecast reports and sea change alarms. Acme’s clients can configure which user(s) receives the report(s).
- Weekly Reports - A detailed weekly report outlining different parameters of the waves, such as wave height and max wave height.
It is essential to highlight that the initial engagement was planned for two months; however, impressed with Maruti Techlabs’ delivery and estimations, Acme decided to extend the engagement by two months to add more new features to the interface.
The team structure that worked on this project consisted of 2 developers, 1 QA engineer, and 1 Project Manager.
"Maruti Techlabs was able to deliver consistently so that we could review everything at every stage. There was also no gap in their communication. As a result, some design decisions were made effectively because they worked well with all the backend engineers, ensuring that there was no friction between the front- and backend.”
- Founder & Managing Director, Acme Corporation
Ensure your app has a tightly coupled frontend & backend. Scale your product development with us!
Communication & Collaboration
The Maruti Techlabs team communicated with the client regularly, ensuring no gaps in expectations and that both parties were always on the same page.
We used Jira software to track product milestones, manage sprints, and release planning. We used Slack for day-to-day communication with the client and internal team. Once our team developed the features, the client reviewed them and suggested changes over Slack or email.
Technology Stack
"Their project management workflow was good because we used various channels to communicate. To be specific, we were able to access Slack channels they organized for us in order to spearhead discussions on particular topics regarding our project. On top of that, whenever we had queries, we could get in touch with their project manager or commercial manager.”
- Founder & Managing Director, Acme Corporation
Our Development Process
We follow Agile, Lean, & DevOps best practices to create a superior prototype that brings your users’ ideas to fruition through collaboration & rapid execution. Our top priority is quick reaction time & accessibility.
We really want to be your extended team, so apart from the regular meetings, you can be sure that each of our team members is one phone call, email, or message away.
A perfect software prototype demands a perfect execution methodology. We follow Agile, Lean, and DevOps best practices to create a superior prototype that brings your users' ideas to fruition through collaboration and rapid execution.
