APPLiA Data Collection Tool
An application that revolves around data processing. We built a central platform for Applia to process data and offer it via Excel files.
APPLiA is a Brussels-based trade association that provides a single, consensual voice for the home appliance industry in Europe, and whose mission is to promote the industry's European lifestyle. APPLiA's members produce a wide variety of home appliances: large and small.
Codana was chosen as a partner to build a central platform that consolidates and offers data to members. The participating companies can offer data about their products via an Excel, after which the person with an 'admin' authority can retrieve a comprehensive, anonymous and bundled output file. This output can then be downloaded by the members. The output is personalized for each participant so that they can easily compare their own data with the total data.
Paolo Falcioni
Director General
APPLiA was looking for a partner that could think along both on a business and technical level, to create the strongest possible foundation for their central data platform. The platform was a pilot project that would allow the members of APPLiA to add their individual information and figures, whereby the system would accumulate and compare the data and then offer anonymized data back to the same members.
Meanwhile, this platform has evolved into a data processing application that incorporates different types of data & household devices. Depending on this type, the tool is going to evaluate different parameters, and either feed back the necessary alerts to the users or not. For example, a notification may pop up if an excessive difference appears in the numerical data between the most recent set of figures and those of the previous period.
What technologies were used for this?
We used Laravel in combination with Backpack, a package that allows us to build administration interfaces in Laravel. This allowed us to meet the client's requirements (user management, companies management, panels management, ...) in a fairly simple way.
To import the Excels and generate the output, we used Laravel Excel, a wrapper that makes it easier to use PhpSpreadsheet in Laravel applications. In it, we worked out the necessary logic and custom adjustments to get to the desired export (different sheets, complicated Excel formulas to calculate certain output, ...).
To make sure imports and exports run smoothly, these are handled in queues via queued jobs that are taken care of by the supervisor, because generating exports can take some time. In this way, it can work stably without affecting the rest of the application.
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