Field Data Collection Case Study

Overview

The client is a pure-play Mid-Continent oil and natural gas producer with two complementary areas of operation-resource drilling and development, and carbon dioxide (CO2) enhanced oil recovery (EOR). With revenues more than $300 million and founded about 30 years ago, the organization is a privately held entity. With more than 480 employees and more than 1 billion barrels of potential reserves, the company is embarking on an exciting new chapter as it accelerates the Mid-Continent program.

The company wanted to develop a Field data collection software which their agents could use to collect the data from the various wells.

Ampere studied these requirements and formulated a complete roadmap detailing out the development considerations and methodology for building the custom software. The solution was successfully deployed to high performance servers. The company is able to make business decisions based on the reports generated by the field data collection software.

Challenges

The agents travel to far flung areas where there is no internet network available. We need to develop a software which the agents could use offline and then sync it.

We need to build a hand held custom software for the agents.
Oil, Gas, Water wells reading of specialized instrument and all instruments have different parameters. So, we need to build a generic product.
Design and develop an app (on iOS platform initially) without any intervention of developer team on frequent UI/Layout changes.
Design an iOS app without depending on native development, but JQuery Mobile, HTML5 & SQLite implementation.To generate funnels.
The iOS app also requires to access certain native functionalities that is not possible to be called by plain HTML5 & JQuery Mobile applications like Access Camera app to click pictures, Display native Alert Box, Display native Confirm Box, Run app in background listening mode, etc.
In future, release the app in other platforms like Android & Windows Phone.
Minimum or no involvement of native iOS developers (which is cost-effective).
To build a platform to integrate other API like Google Analytics, Campaign monitor etc.
Release the final version on App Stores of Apple, Google & Windows Phone.
Develop a system for end-users to automate building & compilation of iOS, Android & Windows Phone Apps from target source code.

Solution

We developed the product with two major parts- Smart data entry (SDE) which is a form generator and Field data collection (FDC) which will be an App which would be installed on the hand held devices. The end product is hosted on the high performance server and a seamless integration is done with the App.

Some of the major activities done to provide the required solution included –

Dynamic rendering of forms UI/Layout by developing a solution that can be leveraged to create dynamic views that can be plugged-in into iOS app views. This was achieved by developing SDE Portal for the Vendor/Customer that generates dynamic HTML5 form layouts with plugged-in validations by using Alpaca JS which is a third party library.

SDE Portal enables the end-user to create dynamic views by dragging and dropping base/generic controls. Database was designed to support the terabytes of user data
Telerik AppBuilder provides a multi-platform app development solution for developing apps with HTML5 & JQuery Mobile
This was achieved by using PhoneGap technology.
Telerik AppBuilder provides support to importing PhoneGap plug-ins to execute native OS functionalities
Telerik AppBuilder allows to build multi-platform apps for iOS, Android & Windows Phone with a common set of source code. Platform specific source code development is not required.
Development with AppBuilder is easy for developers having experience in Microsoft Web Technologies using JQuery, HTML5 & custom JQuery libraries. Also, PhoneGap technology is an open-source solution which is easy to learn and implement.
AppBuilder is a robust solution for achieving the same.
Build drag and drop reporting capabilities
This was achieved by building a customized portal to compile & build app executables (IPA for iOS, APK for Android & XAP for Windows Phone). The end-user uploads app icons, app images, and dynamic texts and selects platform(s) to automate compilation & build to download App Store ready executable version.

Results

The product has improved the efficiency of the business. Now, the top management could focus on the key business areas and the product helped data collection and User interface forms generation process to an auto pilot mode.

Easy to generate forms
Agent data saved as Json objects on the device
Data is synced as it connects to internet
Lowers the cost of the development
Very little technical support is required at the Company end
App is build and deployed only once on the device
Ease of operations of the business
Get powerful reports
Easy to add new features to the forms

Technologies