MPulse Software is a world-class provider of reliable scheduling, tracking, and reporting tools for equipment and facilities maintenance making time and resource management important factors. MPulse leverages their accredited maintenance management software and a mobile application to help streamline work efficiency. Our team was tasked with adding a geo-focusing feature to MPulse Software’s mobile application to better the environment for work efficiency and saving maintenance worker’s time on the job. The feature notifies maintenance workers of any unassigned work orders available based on their location and completion of their daily tasks. This feature creates an environment to save time and increase work efficiency by possibly saving them a trip to a work order near them in the future. To illustrate the uses and possible advantages of the feature we built a stand-alone Android application using Google Flutter that mimics the functionality of MPulse’s current mobile application. Our application uses all of MPule’s styling and centers around the geo-focusing feature to limit the noise of other features. The application dynamically loads applicable work orders for a logged in maintenance worker based on their location gathered by the phones onboard GPS system. This can be done using either a specified radius set by the user or geo-fenced area, whichever is toggled within the settings. The worker is notified through an automated notification system of any available maintenance they can do upon completion of their current tasks. This notification is triggered by an in-app timer that is used by workers to track their time spent on a specific task. Once notified, the user can then decide to add the maintenance to their schedule if they find it applicable, or simply dismiss the notification. If a user wishes to silence notifications, they can also easily turn it off with a settings toggle switch. Google Firebase was used to store application data for its easy startup and seamless integration with our notification features within Firebase Cloud Messaging and Flutter. Google Firebase is a cloud-based NoSQL database that syncs and stores data between users in real-time. Using Firebase allowed easy access to the features that aided in the geo-focusing feature and allowed for real-time changes to the worker’s schedule and prevented jobs from being scheduled by other users within our application.
Quick Summary: Our application is a phone application that a user can login to and see their jobs assigned to them for the day, the week, and the month. They can then use a timer in the application that will track the amount of time they spend on a specific job. Once the job is complete the user will submit their job time. This submission will trigger a notification about jobs that are close to them that they can accomplish that have not been assigned to other workers. They can then add these potential jobs to their work list, or simply dismiss the notification and move on to their next scheduled job.
