Automating a Car Repair Center for a Bus Transportation Company

The client was looking for a comprehensive digital solution to replace lagging manual processes. To facilitate internal workflows, data collection, and real-time reporting, we’ve built a maintenance management app, which is fully integrated with existing corporate systems. As a result, paper-based inefficiencies have shifted toward modernized and automated maintenance tracking.

Our customer, a significant public transportation company with a fleet of more than 600 buses, was dealing with increasing maintenance management difficulties. Up until 2019, all of their activities were conducted on paper records, which resulted in massive volumes of paperwork, slowed down approvals, and increased danger of data loss.

Since then, they have tried many off-the-shelf tools; however, none of them have helped. That’s why they hired Devox Software to create a custom solution for their systems, both workflows and platforms.

The team included a full-stack developer, a QA and a tester, a database expert, and a DevOps engineer.

The entire maintenance procedure was done on paper and several untuned automation apps, leading to inefficient operations and many errors. The most serious insufficiencies included the following:

• Absence of centralized data storage for compliance and maintenance histories, 
• Troubles with standardized, up-to-date reports,
• Lack of sufficient integration with the current enterprise system,
• Slow repair processes’ progress,
• Limited capabilities,
• Data loss,
• No data in hand,
• Maintenance costs increase, and so on.

Back end & Frameworks: .NET 8, C# 12, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, SignalR Core, Hangfire

Front end: HTML5/CSS3/SASS, Bootstrap 5, JavaScript (ES2023), TypeScript, React.js/Angular 17/Blazor

Data and Storage: Microsoft SQL Server 2022, JSON/REST APIs/gRPC, ClosedXML, LinqToExcel, OCR

DevOps and Infrastructure: IIS, Docker/Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi

Security and Observability: IdentityServer/Azure AD/OpenID Connect, Serilog/Seq/ELK Stack, Grafana/Prometheus/Datadog

We’ve delivered custom management software that fully manages and automates the repair center operations as follows:

1. Before the design and development, a thorough analysis of the workflows and processes was conducted to replace paper records, minimize human errors, and ultimately streamline the operations.
2. We’ve created a centralized database for processing and storing maintenance records with many roles and accesses.
3. We’ve added dashboards with analytics on accident and malfunction causes, as well as staff performance and spare parts quality, making grounds for further implementation of smart predictive analysis.
4. Real-time insights into the state of bus maintenance are provided via automated reporting and analytics, including warehouse statuses, etc.
5. We’ve integrated the solution into the current running systems to ensure smooth performance.

The long-awaited results included qualitative and quantitative improvements, including:

• 100% of paper-based procedures were eliminated, reducing administrative burden,
• The data streams have become unified to form material for analysis and AI-powered forecasts,
• Automated analytics cut down reporting time from hours to minutes,
• Improved planning and business decisions thanks to the accurate real-time data.