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Case Study: Leveraging APIs to Build a Mobile App for the Manufacturing Segment
One of our partners, a large manufacturing company, identified a need to create a mobile application that would be utilized by their internal sales and support staff. They turned to Source Allies to build this mobile application for them not only to solve a pain point they were having but also to gain a competitive advantage within the ever-changing market.
Within manufacturing, implementing a mobile application can have many advantages like increased efficiency, scheduling, and productivity management. This application would bridge the gap between manufacturing teams and the sales/support staff. This would provide access to critical information.
While architecting the build of this application, Source Allies was also involved in several strategy conventions around evaluating a shift to the Cloud. Building this application within a cloud environment like Microsoft Azure provides increased performance, accessibility, and security - among many other benefits.
Product
Source Allies provided a full delivery team of software engineers to discover, design, and build this application for our partner. As part of that technical design, we deployed a suite of REST APIs to wrap legacy on-premise web services and data. This made these resources more useful and presented an abstraction layer that allowed for call optimization.
These APIs secured the on-premise data and made it available to the wider internet and the new application we were building. Our focus on designing high quality application programming interfaces (APIs) resulted in not only the success of our project, but also the ability of another project to leverage the same APIs, significantly cutting their development time.
There is also higher adoption across teams to build new APIs following best practices we’ve brought to the organization after seeing the successes from this project. One of these best practices is an API-first design approach which lends itself well to an agile development environment and can transform business priorities for the better. Our partner was thrilled with the resulting mobile application, API best practices throughout development, and the success of leveraging Azure.
Tech Stack
- Azure (API Management, CDN, Storage, App Service)
- Docker
- ASP.NET Core
- NodeJS
- React
Key Results
API Design
Reduction in development time through high quality API design
Maintainability
Long term solution versus a short term gain for our partner
Modernized
Code base to improve API performance