CIO Bulletin

360SmartConnect – Designing and marketing traceability and digital continuity solutions for the world of construction

Traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering and it mainly serves the purpose of accelerating and improving development activities. As a result, it also prevents software defects by visualizing relationships between components. Software teams change or improve their code on a daily basis, sometimes this is initiated from a change request (CR). A CR might originate from a customer demand to change the behavior of the system, just as product management or end-users of your product can initiate such a change Request. Or maybe it’s the customer support team that comes up with bright product improvement ideas. That’s where the benefits of traceability come in. Depending on how your development process is organized, a CR request will likely trigger various activities.

Created in 2017, 360SmartConnect is a universal traceability infrastructure for the world of construction and real estate, allowing to: Acquire, make reliable and share information by guaranteeing respect of the process internally, as well as externally between the various actors. This makes it possible to optimize processes, products and margins, by making the circulation of information more fluid and by increasing trust between players.

Advantages of using traceability solutions

Data and Web Applications in the Field: By reading with smartphone the marker of an element on the ground, the user automatically loads the data and the web application of the object without prior installation or specific device. During this intervention the users can update this data from their smartphone. From the object, by approaching a simple smartphone without a previously installed application, you can display the data and characteristics of the object, consult its documentation, and see how to add files to it. With 360 SmartConnect, the firm has developed a new plugin allowing to directly link construction elements with the BIM model. Thanks to this system, you can, for example, indicate from the site whether one or more elements have been installed. From the platform you can also follow the progress of the project with a 3D view

NFC/QrCode Tags: They are integrated or stuck on the elements / parts / materials that you want to manage (or follow). Each tag points to a unique URL related to a given item, allowing the user to access the web application and specific data for that item. Thanks to the NFC or QR Code markers, your objects become a source of information and/or service. The markers come in the form of stickers, posters or modules fixed or integrated into your objects. They are compatible with most smartphones, only requires an internet connection gives you access to information and application related to the object. Pre-configure the tasks to be carried out for your equipment! And no cheating possible: this traceability can only be recorded from the equipment concerned by the task to be performed! The information is thus authentic and makes it possible to check that a service has been performed before paying for it.

The SAAS Software Platform: The SAAS software platform is accessible from any browser. It is used to manage all the data and elements equipped with markers. It hosts the web applications of each object. Once the markers have been supplied and configured, they must be positioned on or in the object. This operation can be done manually and empirically for a small number of parts. For a more industrial use or a use requiring a certain robustness of the marker, the implementation of the latter quickly becomes sensitive or even critical. Some of the 360SmartConnect markers are designed to facilitate this implementation, which saves considerable time in setting up the process. It is possible to associate useful documentation with each piece of equipment, such as the user manual, for example. You will gain in efficiency with each intervention carried out by the company's services or your external stakeholders.

Smart Marker: An identifier is just a series of numbers and letters if you don't have the knowledge or the tool to interpret it. The difficulty is to know what the marking corresponds to, what information is associated with this identifier. If there is marking, then there is somewhere a "knowledge base", whether it is a simple nomenclature or a complex database. Historically, traceability, as in any industrial process, is based on the identification of objects, unique if possible, by batch and in some cases by piece. 360SmartConnect's markers are "intelligent" because in addition to assigning a unique identifier to the part (serialization) it indicates the path to find the knowledge base associated with the object and the tool to access it. This makes possible a wide dissemination of information controlled by the producer, then by the manager of the object throughout the life cycle of the object.

Rolland Melet | CEO