Inventory Management Software Development for an Energy Company

• Project: Inventory Management Cloud App
• Duration: 3 months
• Technologies: Angular, .Net Core 2.x, EF Core, SQL, Microsoft Azure
• Target audience: IT and HR personnel

The client plans, builds, and operates power plants and customer solutions for generating electricity from renewable sources.

Challenge

Develop custom inventory management software that would function seamlessly across desktop PCs and tablets. This web application would replace cumbersome Excel sheets and provide the company’s IT personnel with a secure and intuitive online platform for managing and tracking inventory management-related tasks. Besides, the platform would log the activity of the IT staff and provide detailed reports to the company’s management.

Process

Bootstrap Development

To gain momentum with the custom development of the inventory management application, Velvetech proposed to use a Bootstrap template. The template came with a ready admin dashboard that the development team was able to customize to fit the client’s requirements. Furthermore, the template shipped with a responsive layout, which meant the app would work in desktop and tablet browsers out-of-the-box.

Inventory Management Cloud App

Being a Microsoft Gold Partner, Velvetech opted for Microsoft tech stack to power the server-side of the application. And to address any future requirements for storing documents and other files in the cloud, it was decided to extend the platform with Microsoft Azure cloud capabilities.

User Roles and Data Migration

The new inventory management application was designed to support three user roles: an IT manager, an HR manager, and a system administrator. The IT worker would be the main user of the application, with access to all inventory management-related features, while the system admin would get some extra options:

• create tasks
• manage employees and system users
• control hardware, phone lines
• view system logs

Once the application had been deployed, the Velvetech team successfully migrated all inventory data from Excel to the app’s database so that the company could continue working with a single solution going forward.

UI/UX Design

The Client wanted to gain maximum value by having an intuitive app interface with a user-friendly design. Velvetech handled this request, delivering a seamless user experience that requires minimum effort on the user’s part.

We crafted and adjusted the filtering interface to the Client’s needs. A user can sort out and search for employees with a particular status — onboarding, on-board, offboarding, off-board — and with overdue tasks. Furthermore, users can add data to favorites making it possible to easily follow important details and changes.

IT and HR staff can also easily edit any information regarding employees, devices, or licenses without the risk of losing essential data. The implemented UI provides users with inline editing while saving the current status — changes, custom filters, displayed columns, their order, or search criteria. Even if, by chance, the user closes the app or logs out of it, all the modifications will be saved.

KPI Dashboards

Driving the company’s control and decision-making process, Velvetech developed a range of interactive KPI dashboards that included various charts and graphs.

A user can view tasks’ details depending on their status: due date or overdue, completed or open. Additionally, a click on a bar with statistics opens a tab that shows all the employees responsible for the tasks with a specific status.

Also, we provided the company’s management with historical performance data to have an overview of tasks below or above the target line during the chosen time period.

Outcome

The energy company has ensured its potential for future growth with a scalable, secure solution that has streamlined the company’s inventory management operations. The new inventory management software automatically assigns the tasks created by the admin to new and leaving employees, which has dramatically relieved the IT staff of monotonous tasks.

The management can easily control all inventory-related operations, track IT personnel performance, and monitor changes to the system — all from a single application.

What’s Next

Velvetech keeps adding low-priority updates to the client’s inventory management system, such as app session optimization — to simplify the system, make it more user-friendly, and accommodate it to the ongoing changes at the company.