Improving the Maintenance and Performance of an Order Management System for a Doors Manufacturer

Summary

The project is a case management system that optimizes the workflow and enables to place and process orders, track contacts and tasks execution, as well as work out the most efficient routes using Google Maps.

The need

The customer wanted to leverage the simplicity and clear structure of Ruby on Rails 3 for its application. It was also essential to add some new functionality to enhance the current workflow of the company. To help managers elaborate the routes for drivers, the application had to feature geolocation services to enable marking the orders right on the map.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• To transfer the existing project to RoR 3, the Altoros team had to rewrite hundreds of lines of the undocumented code.
• The task became even more complicated after it was revealed that project maintenance required improving the initial architecture.
• The web application was created without unit tests, which caused a number of challenges while adding new functionality and fixing bugs.

The solution

The Altoros team started the work over the project with building unit tests to make the process of bug fixing easier and less time-consuming. An approach like that usually makes the development process more efficient and enables better scalability and performance optimization.

The engineers at Altoros analyzed the initial code and completely rewrote it. The team leveraged RoR 3 to build an easily expandable solution with the possibility to extend the functionality in the future. The team also utilized Sass and Haml to optimize the performance of the app and ensure a more convenient maintenance of the project.

The outcome

Altoros has updated the application using Ruby on Rails 3, implemented geolocation services, improved the app performance, and ensured future extension of functionality. The customer can now offer a renewed service that runs several times faster and allows for managing the workflow more efficiently.