Featured Case Study

Africa MiningIQ

Our client is an online African mining project intelligence service with an aim to provide highly relevant and up to date mining information on over 1850 mining projects that are across Africa. Initially, their target audience were mine owners but later on, they start serving all site visitors seeking information on the African mining industry.

URL:
http://www.africanmining.co.za/

Customer’s Problem:

Initially, the customer came to us to overcome the challenge of their system inconsistency and asked for our suggestions on revamp of the application and possible options available to them for making their product more appealing to the end clients.

Customer Interaction:

After a thorough discussion with our client, we proposed the client to revamp the existing application and migrate to a new application. We also suggest to them that keeping in view of an increased use of mobile devices by everyone for accessing necessary information, it will be wise to develop mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms. Having a mobile app will also make things much easier for the clients. Moreover, we also suggest that the app should work in an offline mode so that people can use the app even where there is no internet connectivity.

We then understood the following points that we should take care:

• We have to revamp the database architecture to optimize data and site speed.
• A complete overhaul in terms of reporting is necessary so that the manual work done by the team of Africa Mining IQ can be reduced. We need to deal with mainly the following reports:
  • Comparative analysis report
  • Market size opportunity report
  • Country-wise wise projects report
  • Phase-wise progress report
  • Development reports
  • Commodities report
• The UI of the site should be made responsive so that even people visiting it by using their smartphones or tablets can have an excellent UI experience. After all, more people are now accessing the web by using mobile devices instead of laptops or desktops.
• Africa Mining IQ personnel can get their work done faster if they can reach to the destination page without having to click through multiple listings. The Options to update records for mine owners, mine owner contacts, project engineers, contacts, etc all would be easy to update thereby reducing the time spent as of now.
• A need to set up reminders and alerts for respective users in their email in such a way that those who are clients of Africa Mining IQ can get friendly reminders if their renewal is due and those who are researchers will receive alerts on projects so that possibility of human error is minimized when they update anything over the site.

Solution Offered to Client:

We offer a range of solutions that are as follows:

• Removal of recurring issues and inconsistencies of the site
• Making the database more structured and optimized
• Considerable reduction in database size even after data migration
• Sorting of data redundancies
• Mobile apps for Android and iOS mobile devices

Technology We Used:

For website development

• Web server: Linux

• Scripting language: PHP 5.6

• Framework:CodeIgniter MVC

• Database: MySQL 5.x

For Android app development

• Development language: JAVA

• Offline Database: SQLite

• API: Restful API in JSon Format

For iOS app development

• Development language: Objective C

• Offline Database: SQLite

• API: Restful API in JSon Format

Final Benefit:

With the new application, the client experience a number of benefits that are summarized below.

• Client website becomes optimal with an improved loading speed

• The database becomes more structured, optimized and small in terms of its size

• Extended business opportunities