ECOLAB Rinse Assure Platform
Custom development of a closed application based on Symfony
Ecolab's Food & Beverages Division has developed a new analysis method for calculating cleaning agent residues in production facilities: This had to be digitized with the help of the platform for Ecolab customers.
| Client | Ecolab GmbH |
|---|---|
Project duration | 2019–2020 |
Discover the project from the perspective of:
Base Technology
The Ecolab Rinse Assure platform is a complete custom development for Ecolab. Due to the special requirements, Marketing Factory decided to design and develop a custom solution based on Symfony.
Base Technology
The Ecolab Rinse Assure platform is based on the Symfony framework and was developed completely individually for Ecolab. The development is iterative, i.e. the project started with a prototype and an MVP, which was continuously extended by further functions up to the current expansion stage.
AssessmentCalculator
AssessmentCalculator digitizes Ecolab customers' previously manual analysis processes and is at the heart of the Ecolab Rinse Assure platform. There, based on samples taken for detergent residues, the customer can determine - depending on the type of production facility - whether enough rinsing has been done to safely continue production, or whether residues are still too high to be ultimately safe for consumers. MFC has programmed extensive logic at this point to safely and reliably perform these critical calculations and guarantee its outcome.
AssessmentCalculator
Ecolab's core competence in the project at this point is the various calculation methods used to algorithmically evaluate the processes at Ecolab's customers. Ecolab has invested considerable research effort in developing and evaluating the mathematical methods. MFC has supported Ecolab here in that we have used automatic mass tests to determine the framework conditions for all measurement parameters under which the algorithms are numerically stable and deliver plausible results.
As a result, the application can now be used to automatically assess a cleaning process in the food sector with regard to the toxicity of an Ecolab product. The customer receives a statement as to whether his process removes residues of the products used sufficiently well and receives documentation of this assessment as a PDF for his records. These regularly performed analysis processes are documented in the application. In sum, the customer can thus prove at any time that he has carried out the required measurements. Ecolab, in turn, receives valuable feedback on how its own products perform in the field and can make further statistical use of the customers' own measured values.
Functional tests ensure that MFC's algorithms have been implemented correctly. In addition to the aforementioned trial run to determine stability limits, known-good results also exist in the test suite and have been independently verified by Ecolab staff. As a result, MFC can ensure that the implementation works technically correct.
User Management
User administration can be used to manage all Ecolab employees with administrative access as well as all customers. For Ecolab employees, a 3-level rights model was designed based on the current company structure. Ecolab employees can create and manage their own customers and customer users without having to rely on help from Marketing Factory. The goal in developing the user administration was to provide Ecolab with a self-service application that can be operated without programming knowledge.
Access to the Ecolab Rinse Assure platform is linked to a one-year subscription model for customers, which automatically deactivates access after the subscription expires.
User Management
A multi-level roles and rights concept was implemented for the application. Ecolab has a multi-level management structure in which responsibilities are delimited regionally. Overall functional and technical responsibility lies with the Ecolab Food & Beverages business unit within Ecolab GmbH, Monheim. In addition, each customer company was to have the option of sub-allocating access rights, so that customers could use self-service to assign passwords to their laboratory personnel. This was in Ecolab's interest, as it meant that these tasks did not fall to Ecolab in day-to-day business.
The project therefore has five role levels - two for customers and three for Ecolab. In addition to the account managers for the customers, there are the pure users of the system. On the Ecolab side, there are the Ecolab sales staff, each of whom works with a regional key account manager. The top level is the aforementioned team in Monheim, which oversees the project as a whole.
The correct functioning of the roles and rights is also ensured by functional tests. Both the basic role-based availability of functions and the display of the expected, primarily only own data is also covered by these tests.
Symfony's roles support inheritance. This made it possible to design the roles in such a way that the permissions are successively extended from the bottom up. This increases the overview of the rights assignments and reduces the error-proneness in the configuration.
Document Search and Database
The document database contains various documents on diverse, division-specific products. The database can be filtered by product and document type. The Ecolab product search slot has an auto-suggest function that directly suggests possible products to the user that match the search query. Only the top 10 possible options are always suggested. If the user deletes his previous input again, the first 10 products (alphabetically) are displayed by default in the dropdown.
There are the following document types in the second selection field:
- Supplementary information
- Test strip
- Surface tension
- Photometry
- Conductivity
Document Search and Database
The document search was quite a challenge, since each customer should only have access to certain information. For example, a customer should only receive documents on products that he himself uses. In this way, Ecolab's protection interests are also implemented. Ecolab employees, on the other hand, should have access to all documents for consulting purposes.
The role concept of Symfony offered a good solution here. A user role now decides whether a specific user gets access to all products or not.