Case Study: GreaseCloud

Providing analytics and verification for the greasing of industrial equipment to ensure on-time lubrication to specification.

At a Glance

Y-Combinator-backed Australian start-up GreaseBoss engaged Jaegersoft to design and develop GreaseCloud, a proposed sophisticated cloud platform that integrates with its GreaseBoss IoT head unit. The aim was to orchestrate the tracking and tracing of dispensed lubrication in heavy machinery within large industrial sites. 

GreaseBoss consulted Jaegersoft to solve the performance issues that hindered scalability on a legacy GreaseCloud system. The solution proposed was to design, develop, and deploy a new platform that would have the ability to expand, and support added functionality. 

Working in close collaboration, Jaegersoft delivered a high-performant microservice-driven architecture to provide boundless scalability. The level of extensibility and flexibility we supplied ensures easy integration with the ever-evolving suite of GreaseBoss products. 

Our services:

  • Requirements discovery
  • Research and feasibility study
  • Software design and specification
  • Software product development 

Meet the Client

Incorrect greasing is the most common cause of machinery failure on industrial sites, costing the global economy more than $21 billion per year. GreaseBoss focuses on solving this problem and has developed a management system that simplifies and verifies industrial machinery greasing for the mining, construction, agriculture, and utility sectors. GreaseBoss is leading the digital transformation of greasing. Its system ensures greasing is safer, more reliable, and more productive than anything else on the market. 

The Challenge

The GreaseBoss head unit allowed technicians to track, trace, and upload manual greasing data from grease guns to a web API platform. The existing legacy web platform faced scalability and performance issues, struggling to manage GreaseBoss’s expanding customer base. GreaseBoss identified the need to provide its customers with an extensible and reliable web platform to support new functionality as it evolved its hardware technology. 

GreaseBoss approached Jaegersoft to break down this challenge and together we proposed the GreaseCloud platform. The platform is a scalable cloud ecosystem that easily integrates with the existing GreaseBoss head unit as well as new GreaseBoss products. Providing users with a seamless experience in managing greasing data and analytics was also a top priority. 

GreaseBoss and Jaegersoft understood there were aspects of this project that needed to turn the complex into the simple and included the following. 

  • Developing an application customers can access on different cloud service providers (cloud-agnostic) or provisioned in siloed instances in their organisation’s private network. 
  • Developing a modular and scalable cloud ecosystem, which ensured easy and efficient integration with new GreaseBoss products and technologies.
  • Designing a user interface that was intuitive and seamless for greasing technicians to use.
  • Developing a cloud application with state-of-the-art charting and analytics functionality for historical greasing data. 

The Solution

We supplied the GreaseCloud platform to GreaseBoss after following our software product development process, which ensures the delivery of a high-quality product while mitigating risk. 

Discovery

Initial engagements resulted in Jaegersoft undertaking workshop sessions with GreaseBoss along with a systematic review of the existing web application. We sought to understand feedback GreaseBoss customers were providing about its limitations. Jaegersoft proceeded with running a requirements discovery workshop to ensure alignment with the GreaseBoss team and to fully understand the project vision for GreaseCloud. 

We adhered to lean principles to flesh out requirements and understand the high-value and priority features for the design and implementation of GreaseCloud. 

Jaegersoft conducted work to optimise the legacy web application in parallel with designing and implementing GreaseCloud. This ensured we provided GreaseBoss customers with an optimal experience as immediately as possible.

Design

Jaegersoft undertook a thorough product specification and design sprint to develop UI/UX Wireframes and an IEEE Standard Design Document specification for the GreaseCloud Platform. 

This allowed the GreaseBoss team to finalise the software product from a technical and user experience standpoint before commencing any development.  This ensured the product specification for GreaseCloud met its vision and mitigated risk of code rework during the development phase.

Development

Jaegersoft’s agile software development phase delivered value to GreaseBoss. Weekly sprints with a product showcase allowed us to gather feedback dynamically along with fine-tuning continuous improvements to the GreaseCloud platform. 

Developing a platform application deployable in a cloud-agnostic manner or on a private, siloed instance within an organisation network ensured there was complexity in creating the system architecture. 

Jaegersoft successfully delivered. We built an API-powered, highly performant micro-services architecture-driven platform. GreaseBoss customers can containerise it for flexible deployment environments, either as a browser or desktop application. 

Delivery

Jaegersoft ensured the seamless deployment of the GreaseCloud platform, setting up the cloud infrastructure DevOps environment for easy continuous integration and development pipeline (CI/CD). 

Based on customer feedback, Jaegersoft and GreaseBoss knew there would be changes and fixes. We provided maintenance packages to ensure Jaegersoft was the technical team on standby for GreaseBoss to support its customers and make changes rapidly as requested. 

Results

  • Technicians and reliability engineers can now monitor site greasing data from a single cloud source.
  • Consolidated data with analytics functionality now offers GreaseBoss customers an 800% increase in report generation times, a significant difference from existing manual grease logging and data analysis.
  • Highly decoupled event-driven microservice architecture and domain-driven design principles create an easily managed software product conducive to highly parallelised development workflow, greatly reducing maintenance cost and development times.
  • Improved user experience developed in close collaboration with GreaseBoss, massively streamlining and expediting its customer site set-up/management process.