Mediacom - Maintenance Activity Program

The Maintenance Activity Program is a system developed by CSW  to manage scheduling, assignment, exectution, and billing field jobs created by supervisors and technicians on a daily basis across every single town in which Mediacom has a presence.
This web application was created in response to a need for higher scalability, availability, and performance. Every feature was carefully and efficiently designed to handle the large amount of data involved in most of the processes.






There were enormous challenges in building this project. In particular, producing a unique highly efficient easy-to-use product capabale of handling multiple roles and large sets of data in timely fashion. The other major challenge was designing a synchronization module that kept all the mobile devices connected to the system through the cellular network up-to-date. This module had to be also smart enough to minimize the traffic on the network and prioritize information based on a previously stablished set of priorities.




Developing this solution took us about 8 months. During that period we also dedicated some time to investigate and evaluate different frameworks, controls-set, and approaches until we were completely satisfied with the result obtained. The tools and technologies used for this project were nHibernate, AJAX, Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET (AJAX and Reporting), SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 3.5, and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite as development tool.




The result, was a highly intuitive and fast interface that enabled Mediacom's staff to start using the system with minimum training. Because this a web application, it only has a single point of maintenance and patching to administer to, which considerably simplifies the rollout and updating processes. 



Once Mediacom's executives evaluated the main job management module produced from the initial development, they realized that they had a powerful solution. So they requested the addition of an invoicing module to enable the system to not only manage field operations, but also to complete the cycle of billing/payment that frequently takes place when jobs are finished. This module was successfully incorporated into the system in early stages without any setback. Now the system is a complete, flexible solution for any scenario where jobs (or tasks) are created on the spot and need to be scheduled, assigned, and executed in an efficient way; capable also of synchronizing mobile devices such as cell phones or handhelds (optional), and handling different levels of security roles.