Hub.brussels Saw A Whooping 450% Performance Improvement with iPad-based Data Collection Platform on AWS

hub.brussels is a leading agency based in Brussels-Capital Region. It focuses on supporting the Brussels economy by promoting the establishment of new businesses and improving town planning of districts. Also, hub.brussels has been supporting all the existing across districts in Brussels for many years. It partnered with Blazeclan wit an  aim to build a robust analytics tool that promotes building the next-generation shopping sector and installments of new shops.

The Need for A Data Collection Platform

hub.brussels previously relied on manual data encoding by field agents regarding the business dynamics across the region. This further led to an inaccurate and illegible collection and upload of data. Point-of-sale (POS) survey, customer survey, pedestrian flow, and stands missions have already been helping hub.brussels collect information.

Key requirements included

• Enhancing the UI/UX to facilitate use for non-technical users.
• Creating predefined field data gathering circuits.
• Creating well-sequenced questions to avoid any redundancy.
• Improving the adaptability of applications on field.
• Enabling automated transmission of ingested data to the data lake, which can then directly be used on the web application.
• Bringing a high degree of control in user management.

“By developing a custom cloud environment for hub.brussels, Blazeclan helped us to improve the way we monitor Brussels economy and the way we provide advices to companies located in the region. Blazeclan was a strong partner and helped us to understand our users concerns, suggested an adapted technical solution to fullfil them and developed this solution with a great project management.”

Juan Vazquez Parras, Head of Project Services - hub.brussels

The Solution

Blazeclan developed an iPad-based data collection tool, through which hub.brussels are provided with methodical representation of the existing data. The access of this iPad application is restricted to the hub.brussels’ team i.e. field agents. The data collected through this platform includes the market survey, point of sales survey, customer survey, and pedestrian flow. In short, this platform has been built to collect all data associated with Businesses in the region.

The Approach

• A comprehensive functional analysis has been done from the perspective of both technical and operational.
• Multiple proof-of-concepts (POCs) have been prepared for validating the approach and scope of the solution.
• For validating the functional analysis and the POCs prepared, multiple field trips have been conducted with field agents.
• The iPad application was developed with the highest agility possible. Here all field agents and stakeholders were delivered with the capability to make further modifications to the application.
• A robust project management was used for successful implementation of the iPad application.

Benefits Achieved by the hub.brussels

Seamless Data Consolidation: The application provided hub.brussels with a seamless data consolidation, which otherwise too almost two years and the data would go outdated before the reports were generated. It helped them simply consume the gathered data instantly as and when required.

Convenient Data Accessibility: The application enabled a convenient access to the data gathered, which furthered changed the culture within the organization as even the non-data oriented users were able to access the data easily. The application was made highly dependable with updated dashboards that drive performance and deliver high quality reports.

High Reliability: The iPad-based application delivered high reliability, as it offered simplified versions of the information on the web application. The data captured asynchronously is stored on the device and sent to the data lake for further processing and exploration.

Tech Stack