Is your organization in need of a cutting-edge, custom-developed application? AIS is quickly becoming the go-to organization by developing innovative solutions like KCI Technologies’ new Windows 8 UI application. The application will enhance the efforts of the organization’s initiative to further develop its mobility program. AIS is currently preparing for this exciting endeavor and expects the application to move into full production in early 2014. Here’s a more detailed look at what we’re doing…
Background
KCI Technologies is an employee-owned engineering, consulting and construction firm serving clients throughout the eastern United States and beyond. Their multi-disciplined service catalog allows the organization to provide exceptional turnkey expertise to federal, state and local government agencies, as well as institutional and private-sector clients. More than 1,000 KCI employee-owners provide environmental, transportation, telecommunications, construction, facilities and land development services from offices in 14 states—Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia—and the District of Columbia. With revenues of approximately $146 million in 2011, Engineering News-Record Magazine has placed KCI 81st among the top engineering firms in the country.
The Challenge
AIS initially worked with the leadership team at KCI to support the development of the initial architecture for their new Mobile Field Services (MFS) application. The application consists of a Microsoft Azure-based set of services and a Windows 8 Modern UI app. The purpose of the app is to support field inspections in both network connected and network disconnected environments. After the initial architecture was created, it was determined that AIS would help design and implement the Windows 8 app portion of the solution.
Solution
As one of AIS’ exciting new endeavors, our firm will work under a multi-month agreement to deliver a system that is projected to move into production in January 2014. The project will be delivered under multiple iterations; each iteration will add additional functionality and will provide an incrementally larger audience to provide feedback on the project.
As a proven leader and innovator in custom application development, this approach falls in line with AIS’ organized methodologies which will enable our firm to enhance KCI’s mobile program. As this project continues to move forward, we will publish our progress and we fully expect a successful product launch in early 2014.
Business and Technical Achievements
Our client will be able to better manage their mobile operations, leading to increased productivity among the organizations field workers. The custom-developed application will enable the following:
- Mobile field application construction management
- Mobile utility services
- Mobile resource allocation
Features of the application include:
- Offline synchronization support
- Free-form sketch annotations
- Picture capture
- GPS tracking
- Bing Maps integration
- Asynchronous notifications
Technology
- Microsoft Azure
- Windows 8 Store App
- HTML/CSS/JavaScript/WinJS
- Visual Studio 2012
