When a critical legacy engineering application could no longer keep up, a global industrial equipment manufacturer partnered with Techlancer to build a modern custom web app — collaborating closely to migrate complex engineering calculations onto a maintainable, service-based platform.
Key outcomes:
- Increased employee satisfaction
- Labor reduction
- Improved data accessibility
- Risk reduction
Client – A Global Industrial Equipment Manufacturer
Problem
Our client designs, builds, and maintains large industrial equipment for companies around the globe. One department — engineers focused on the design and sales of large conveyor dryers, burners, and coolers — was struggling with a legacy application that handled the technical calculations and design of these complex machines.
Their legacy system suffered from several serious issues:
- It couldn’t run on modern operating systems, forcing the team onto a handful of aging, outdated machines that no longer complied with their IT department’s requirements.
- Those aging machines presented data loss risks in the event of equipment failure.
- The application’s unforgiving command-line user interface caused inefficiency and frustration: if an engineer accidentally entered incorrect data, the entire process had to start over.
- The application couldn’t be updated when formula changes were needed — whether to correct identified errors or to accommodate newer equipment specs.
It was clear the client needed to move to an upgraded application. But migrating came with its own challenge: the application performed complicated engineering calculations that most software development teams were simply not familiar with.
Solution
Techlancer and the client collaborated on the development of a modern application:
- A couple of the client’s team members were familiar with Python. They developed the Python code to handle the engineering calculations.
- Techlancer developed the front end and API, giving users a modern UI.
- Techlancer’s team worked closely with the client’s engineers to refactor the calculation code into a services architecture running on Azure Functions.
This services approach lets the client deploy changes to their engineering calculations whenever needed — without redeveloping the API or front end.
Results / Outcomes
- Increased employee satisfaction
- Labor reduction
- Improved data accessibility
- Risk reduction
- The engineering team can now make technical changes to their formulas themselves
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Web App Development
- User Interface Design
- Error Alerting
Overview
The new application provides:
- A modern, intuitive UI
- Greater data accessibility for team members around the world
- Exports that assist other departments
- The ability for the client’s developers to update the engineering formulas when needed
Software Needs Assessment
We met with the client’s team to understand the process they follow when designing their machines. The Techlancer team walked through their lab and facility to see those processes firsthand, then reviewed the old application along with the challenges and concerns it created.
Demo and Scoping
Eager to show what a modern application could do, our team designed a demo application to present our vision for the new system. We also provided a ballpark estimate of the timeline and cost.
Development
Working in close collaboration with the client’s developers, our team refactored the Python code for use in Azure Functions and built a modern, user-friendly UI.
Testing
Given the complex and critical nature of the application and its formulas, our team prioritized testing the functions that mattered most. We gave the client’s team a sandbox to test the application as it was developed and provide feedback along the way.
As the application approached completion, we guided the client through a UAT process, comparing results from the new application against the legacy application — accounting for the desirable differences that came from improved functionality.
As launch neared, the client hit problems with their legacy application. They were working on a new project for one of their customers, and the legacy application consistently crashed when attempting to build the design. The new application was already being actively tested by their team and had performed very well in accuracy testing — so the lead stakeholder decided to develop the new project in the new application, while assigning the manual process of building the machine to another engineer as a backup. The new application performed as hoped and allowed the team to design the machine in a fraction of the time the manual process took.
Launch
Once the application was approved for production use, we:
- deployed the application to the client’s on-prem server, and
- provided go-live support to rapidly assist users with any issues that arose.
Technologies
- C#.Net
- React.js
- Microsoft SQL
- Entity Framework
- Azure Functions (on prem)
- IIS