Executive summary Executive summary
About our client
Fluke Corporation is a US-based company that manufactures, distributes, and services electronic test tools and software for measuring and condition monitoring. The company employs about 2,400 people and has distributor and manufacturer representative channels in more than 100 countries.
Business challenge
The client needed to get better visibility into asset condition and ensure high performance, customization, and scalability of Fluke solutions and their seamless integration with CMMSs such as SAP, Emaint X4/X5, and IBM Maximo.
N-iX approach
The N-iX team has helped the client to improve asset maintenance by arming maintenance teams with critical asset information in real-time and tools that can effectively process it.
Value delivered
- increase in equipment uptime;
- reduced maintenance costs;
- better performance, customization, and scalability of Fluke products.
Success story in detail
- improve the reliability and uptime of assets;
- reduce maintenance costs;
- move from on-premise to SaaS and make Fluke products cloud-oriented;
- enhance the performance of Fluke solutions;
- make Fluke solutions easy to customize and scale.
- establishing effective communication and cooperation with other remote teams of the client;
- ensuring rapid integration of Fluke products with a number of new CMMSs;
- transforming Fluke products into multi-tenant applications making them cloud-native;
- ensuring high security for SaaS applications.
The roots of N-iX cooperation with Fluke Digital Systems
Fluke Digital Systems is a business unit of Fluke Corporation that manages the Fluke Accelix ecosystem of connected tools and solutions, which includes Fluke Sensors, eMaint CMMS, and SCHAD Mobile Work Management solutions. The company designs, develops, manufactures, and sells commercial electronic test and measurement instruments that allow engineering staff of global enterprises to remotely access, monitor, and manage their assets from mobile phones and other mobile devices such as iPads or tablets.
N-iX partnership with Fluke Digital Systems started in 2017, when Fluke Corporation acquired SCHAD and united its effort with them to help maintenance technicians achieve the best asset performance. Before that, N-iX had been a strategic partner of SCHAD for four years. While partnering with SCHAD, a software development team at N-iX collaborated with them on a number of tasks:
- helped SCHAD maintain all their existing products;
- developed several new products such as Inventory Manager and Work Order Manager for Maximo;
- provided the built-in offline support with the help of the engine written with Java and JavaScript and Apache CouchDB;
- designed prototypes for the Automated Meter Reading solution;
- built a platform for hybrid mobile solutions that support Android, iOS, and Windows.
Dedicated development team for Fluke Digital Systems
After SCHAD joined Fluke Corporation, a software development team at N-iX proceeded with the development of mobile solutions for better asset maintenance within the same business direction. The initial goals set by SCHAD haven’t changed but only extended. At the beginning of our partnership with Fluke Digital Systems, the N-iX team consisted of 8 specialists. Within 2 years, it has increased to 22 members, including front-end and back-end developers, manual and automation QA specialists, a QA manager, a QA lead, a Dev Manager, a data scientist, a DevOps engineer, a UX/UI designer, an architect, and a product owner.
N-iX software engineers work in close cooperation with the client’s team and other remote teams of the client that are located in the USA (Everett, Florida), India (Bangalore), and Ireland (Dublin). The N-iX team implements the best Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban to ensure an efficient and effective development life cycle.
Expert services provided by N-iX
N-iX team has been working on Fluke Mobile, formerly known as Fluke Connect2Mobile, a solution that enables users to perform work order management and inventory management tasks from mobile devices. It comprises several products: Inventory Manager, Work Order Manager, Work Order Requests, and Alarms and supports CMMS from several major vendors: IBM Maximo, Emaint X4/X5, and SAP.
Software engineers at N-iX have provided Fluke Digital Systems with back-end and front-end software development services. They have developed a new mobile client Work Order Requests for Emaint X4 and have been working on porting Work Order Manager to Emaint X5 and SAP.
N-iX has also provided the client with data science expertise. A data scientist has been working on data analysis to improve the health condition of assets.
To meet the demands of today’s high-energy and high-hazard workplace, Fluke Digital Systems needed to ensure that its products allow for growth and are fully customizable. The N-iX team has enhanced the configuration capabilities of the multi-tenant apps by developing the FM Admin tool.
Software developers at N-iX have been working on FM Alarms, a product that helps detect abnormal behavior of equipment and sends a notification to the user’s mobile device. They refactored back-end and front-end, performed code reviews and bug fixing, and implemented some new features: control panel and asset location.
N-iX team has been also collaborating on Fluke Connect2Assets, formerly SCHAD Automatic Meter Reading. It helps intelligently monitor the equipment health by analyzing PLC/SCADA sensors that generate billions of condition.
N-iX engineers have ensured high security standards for SaaS applications. They use data encryption for protecting data both in transit and at rest. N-iX team also applies security architecture best practices for building SaaS applications.
N-iX software engineers have collaborated with the client’s team on improving the usability of the system by incorporating the best UX/UI practices. They have also provided the DevOps expertise and helped improve software development processes with CI/CD, and the Git flow branching model.
The N-iX team has provided manual and automated testing services. The QA team at N-iX is quite diverse. A QA lead oversees QA specialists at N-iX and is responsible for reliability, usability, and performance of the products developed by N-iX. A QA manager manages all the remote QA specialists of the client to ensure that products meet the client’s requirements.
N-iX has helped Fluke Digital Systems to improve asset maintenance and significantly decrease maintenance costs. Software developers have ensured reactive and preventative maintenance of equipment based on real-time asset data rather than a predefined calendar. They also have guaranteed security and reliability of applications in cloud.
Thanks to the innovative technology stack, Fluke solutions can meet high scalability and customization goals. By incorporating industry best practices, N-iX has helped Fluke Corporation empower organizations to intelligently monitor the equipment, reducing unplanned downtime.
