Background

Sarpi Schkopau is a wholly owned subsidiary of the largest European hazardous waste disposal company, SARP Industries-VEOLIA. There were several issues that the company faced.

• Documentation requirements in a strictly regulated industry: Waste disposal is a strictly regulated industry. Therefore, a large part of the daily work in the plants must be thoroughly documented (e.g. the tank levels of operating materials, the quantities burned, problems with machines and measured values ​​in wastewater treatment).
• Ensuring flawless operation through documentation: Shift managers must always have an overview of operational processes and failures. In shift operations, clean documentation is essential as part of the shift handover.
• Time for the actual work: With all the advantages of documentation, there must be enough time for the actual work.

But of course there was already digital documentation beforehand: there is a previous tool that has been providing good service for years.

However, there are a few reasons why Sarpi Schkopau needs a new tool:

• The underlying data structure of the existing tool is not comprehensive: i.e. a lot of information is regularly entered as free text. This leads to discrepancies in data quality and makes the structured evaluation of shift reports more difficult.
• The user experience is no longer up to date: This of course makes acceptance in the factory more difficult, because all employees are used to good UX from their digital leisure activities.
• The company-wide introduction of Google products makes future operation of the Microsoft Access-based application impossible.
• The maintenance and further development of the existing tool will become increasingly difficult in the future due to the reasons mentioned above.

The implementation

Following our tried and tested approach, we started the collaboration with a concept sprint. The application can then be expanded to other works later.
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We talk to the various user groups in structured interviews and mock-up walkthroughs in order to develop the new shift book tool from the outset so that it solves the users' daily problems and is user-friendly.
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The tool focuses on the following topics:

• Complete coverage of the resulting data points (tens of thousands per year) in a database structure so that both regulatory and economic requirements for the data are met.
• Modularity and reusability in the developed application, so that the Shiftbook tool can also be used at other Sarpi Germany plants in the future.
• Good UX to maintain long-term acceptance of the tool.
• Integration into the group's Google Cloud strategy.
  
  

Collaboration

The starting MVP was based on the breakdown and prioritization from the concept sprint. We worked in 2-week sprints with customer meetings at the end of the sprints. Our collaboration is a process of continuous development incl. hosting and maintenance.

Technology Deep Dive

The Shift Book is a container-based fullstack Typescript application.

• It is hosted in an AWS Kubernetes cluster. This enables access from anywhere with high security standards and good scalability.
• Authentication is done via Google Accounts using Passport.js. This means users don't have to remember any additional data and can log in with one click.
• With the help of Nuxt Sessions we ensure that the user remains logged in until they log out or the maximum session duration is exceeded. This offers the best balance between user experience and security.
• PostgreSQL and TypeORM in conjunction with Yup were used for the database. This enabled us to achieve higher development speed and lower error susceptibility through Yup schemas.
• For a modern user interface we used VueJs and AntDesign.
• With the help of html2pdf.js we enabled the dynamic export of reports as PDF files.
• We used Chart.js to visualize data because it worked very well in conjunction with Nuxt 3 and offered high type security.