Vehicle Design & Development Tool

Ensuring Full Reliability in a Live Migration of a High-Availability System.

Highlights

Live migration of an application for vehicle design and development planning, from old technology to future trends.
It required the preservation of the functionality while adhering to new coding standards.
Fortech took full ownership of the project and accountability for the success of the migration, with a team of over 27 software engineers.

Team Size: 27+ People

Duration: 7 Years (ongoing)

Technologies: C#, .NET Framework 3.5, Oracle

Services: Project Management, Software Development, Software Testing, Translations

Trends: Smart Manufacturing

Solution

Similar to a PLM (Product Life Cycle Management) software, the product is a planning system used for vehicle design and development processes. It contains approximately 200 forms integrated into the main application window and structured into categorized menus.

Fortech performed a live/progressive migration of the entire solution to a new framework, by working on each form of the application individually. To perform the live/progressive migration, we created a framework written in .NET that allowed us to run the old application forms as plugins in the .NET platform, in parallel with the new .NET C# forms.

The team at Fortech successfully implemented the corresponding .NET forms, while bringing new UI standards and styles to meet the user interaction needs.

Collaboration

Initially written in older technology, the highly-used software required a mandatory upgrade before the support for that technology was discontinued.

The application was constantly running and could not be stopped for the migration, challenge that our client could not handle internally.

The collaboration with Fortech started over 7 years ago when the client sought a reliable, long-term technology partner to undertake the migration of the project.

Through constant communication and regular meetings with the client, the nearshore team at Fortech successfully understood and handled every aspect of the project, including specific tasks related to the business logic of the application.

All delivery milestones were met, and we are currently offering support in a maintenance phase. Additionally, we started a new project for the client and our team is currently developing a series of PoC (Proof of Concept) applications in the Xamarin framework.

Client Benefits

RELIABILITY
Constant uptime for the application throughout the entire migration.

PERFORMANCE
Better loading times for different forms and shorter execution times for processes.

IMPROVED USABILITY
With new UI standards and styles.

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) System

The software is a product lifecycle management tool used for documenting data on the product management process throughout its complete lifecycle. It improves the operational efficiency of our client, by comprising all product documentation in a single central system.

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This is a software platform for managing the configuration, installation and operation of our client’s fleet management product. The product is a device installed on vehicles to enable the monitoring of their health status and to optimize the management of the fleets.

Solar Inverters Monitoring System

This is a complete suite of desktop, web and mobile software applications for the control and monitoring of solar inverters. It handles the configuration and control of the inverters and provides real-time error monitoring and reporting. The connections to devices rely on proprietary application-layer communication protocols.