Contact person: Business Client

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Location: Avoca Beach, Australia

Budget: Recommended by industry experts

Time to start: As soon as possible

Project description:
"The Client is an engineering consulting firm, providing services to major commercial property owners in relation to items of serviceable high risk equipment located at various properties.
BUSINESS REQUIREMENT
The Client requires the ability to source information from various service contractor companies, and provide a summary of the information back to their own customers. The customers require the ability to review maintenance information in real time for the items of serviceable equipment installed within their various buildings.
Each customer will have multiple contracts with various service contractor companies that are providing maintenance services for their properties.
The intention is to aggregate and store this information so that it can accessed by the customer via our website, to provide a holistic, customer centric view of the information. A ‘dashboard’ summary of their vertical transportation equipment, showing the maintenance status of each unit.
The service contract companies (service providers) are large multinationals, and each company has robust IT systems to manage real data on the serviceable equipment.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Objective:
Each service contractor provides customer accessible API’s to extract and store maintenance information for the serviceable equipment managed by the organisation (on behalf of each customer).
Source data for each companies API’s is available for download, and each company provides a developer guide and developer support. The service contractors selected data should be downloaded to the Client’s VPS, and stored securely in a local database, and then made available for presentation within each customers online dashboard.
Each customer will securely login to the Client’s website “portal” to view their equipment data from the various service contractor companies.

BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
Functional Requirements
• Ability to connect to and retrieve selected data from four distinct service contractors via each contractors API.
• Data normalization: unify different API payload structures into a common schema.
• Data must then be stored locally on the Client’s newly configured VPS and made available for fast retrieval.
• Interface/API required to allow authorized applications/users to fetch curated elevator data.
• Reporting or “dashboard” capabilities required for customers.
• Data must be able to reported on via selectable date ranges.
Non-Functional Requirements
• High data security: encrypt data at rest and in transit.
• Regular data refresh, frequency as per business need (e.g., hourly).
• Scalability to add more data sources in the future.
• Monitoring & logging of ingestion jobs for troubleshooting and auditing.
• Error handling and alerting when API sources are unavailable.
• Data quality validation & deduplication.
High-Level Architecture
1. Data Ingestion Layer (sourcing information from lift companies)
o Build a Python-based data ingestion pipeline to fetch and normalize data from each company's public API.
o Schedule automated pulls at required intervals (using schedulers like cron, Airflow, or built-in Python schedulers).
o Build in backend monitoring and portal management to ensure that you are aware and can see that uploads are completing.
2. Data Storage (Understanding and managing the data)
o Store normalized data in a local relational database (e.g., Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, or SQLite).
o Ensure proper schema design to accommodate disparate data models from different APIs.
o You will require a Relational Data model in the database – Eg what data are you sourcing from the websites, what data are you managing from customers.
o User management system must be provided. Each customer may have many individual users who need to use the system. Client will need to be able to create (or approve) the users. PI (Personal Information ) will be needed from customers – eg usernames, email addresses and mobile numbers, so must be held securely.
3. Infrastructure
o You will required to setup an application server to host the code and source the information from the service contractors – this is your integration layer.
o You will required to create the databases – (these can be freeware – eg Mongo DB )
o You will need to configure backup and recovery of the application – in the event of failure
o You will need to develop both a production and non-production (test environment) to complete the build and test and manage any patches/upgrades and modifications
o You will required to make any changes should the OS / Database and Integration layers require future updates
o You will be provided with VPS hosting to suit the requirements of the build.
4. Customer Portal - Data Layer/API (Customer facing website)
o Expose data via an internal API or service for downstream presentation layers to the Clients customers
o Presentation Layer - Customer-facing dashboards or applications that fetch data from the API/data layer to the HTML Website
o Consideration of data storage requirements and security – eg Data Encryption at rest and in transit.
o Consideration of authentication requirements – how will the Clients customers authenticate to access the portal – user administration and management. Potential need to include MFA (multi-factor authentication).
o Consideration of authorisation levels per user (once authenticated – what are they authorised to see – eg – Customer 1 users, can only see their own contracted units from each lift company, and not customer 2 units. Customer 1 users may be able to view all of customer 1’s unit portfolio/properties, or only some of customer 1’s units/properties.
5. Security & Compliance
o Ensure secure API handling (use HTTPS, manage API keys/tokens securely, minimise expired tokens or errors).
o Store data in compliance with local regulations and internal security guidelines.
o The Client has a website that the portal can be linked with – however the new customer portal must include advanced security – like a Web Application Firewall for protection of all customer and service contractor data
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Compliance & Internal Policy Notes
• All API code must be reviewed for licensing restrictions and data usage policies.
• Data access should comply with Oracle’s internal data privacy and security guidelines.
• Avoid retaining personally identifiable information (PII) unless explicitly required and ensured compliant.
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PHASE ONE
Build a prototype for initial pilot.
o Pick one customer from Client list to use as proof of concept.
o Pick one lift company to extract and store information.
o Complete API extracts for target service contractor.
o Build initial report for one customer based on available information.
o Include a file management structure for storing important documents related to serviceable units or customer sites (upload/view/download).
Sample images of reporting charts or “dashboards” can be provided." (client-provided description)