Building an IoT enabled Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS)

Team Daffodil, on analyzing the app requirements, proposed a development roadmap to the client which included user stories, technical specifications, and recommendations to give an edge to their app idea. Team Daffodil developed a meeting room management system that facilitates everyone in the organization to orchestrate meeting room reservations. The application allows users to check the meeting room status (occupied or vacant), notify attendees and other stakeholders (services) about the reservation, reschedule or change meeting room, extend, cancel, or revocate the meeting room, etc.

The seat management system allows employees to book a seat for themselves. The system validates the employee health using the Arogya Setu app (in India) and allows them to choose a seat at the preferred location, cancel/update booking requests, mark the seat as occupied or vacant, share feedback for the services, etc.

The hygiene monitoring and management system creates a plan/schedule for hygiene as per the organization. The supervisor uses handheld devices to measure factors such as ATP meter and other handheld devices to take the air quality measurements. The application fetches the ATP and AQR readings through APIs from the third-party handheld devices placed in the meeting rooms.

To manage meeting room/employee seat reservations, hygiene, and related activities, Android and iOS mobile apps were developed with different staff roles (employee, guest, security/reception, pantry services, janitorial services, etc.). Along with this, a web portal was developed that allows the admin to manage the staff roles, services, seats, and other facilities within the organization.

For meeting room management, the admin can check for info like room utilization, utilization by location, utilization by the person (most used by), canceled bookings catering reports, future bookings, no-show reports, booking history, etc.

In the admin portal for seat management, the admin gets the report having information about seat utilization (occupied or vacant seats). Seat utilization (temporary or permanent), upcoming bookings, no-show reports, etc.

For hygiene management, the admin can check hygiene measurement plans and get info on non-compliance with hygiene measures with date filters.

Implementation Highlights:

• Daffodil created a cloud architecture using Google Cloud Platform services. Since the application had a large scope of work with numerous services, the microservices architecture was adopted. This ensured that the services are scaled, whenever required (without affecting the functionality of the entire app). Moreover, to ensure that database queries don’t have a load, an individual database was assigned to each service.
• For fault-tolerance and scalability, containerized applications were developed. This was done to ensure that load-on one service does not require the entire application to scale up. Containerization also helps in optimizing the overall cost of the application.
• The APIs used in the application is secured with the hashed encrypted token. Any request to the server is encrypted using the Spring Auth tool.
• The databases are kept in a private subnet. Since microservices would be connecting with external networks, they will pass through the GCP gateway. This will ensure that the IP is not publicly visible to the intruders. The microservices are connected with the internet but their original source is hidden.
• For disaster recovery, timely backup cluster resources are taken. This backup also helps in the migration of cloud data, restoring migration data to the production environment, etc.