Laravel, Concept, Innovative, OCR

Spare Parts – when needed

ASA-lift is a well-established company who builds unique farming machines which are in use all over the world. Each machine is custom built, and each has own and unique spare parts. Since machines are distributed via partners and since machines often can change owners, it is not always easy to keep a link between the producer, ASA-lift, and the users daily operating the Machines. The scenario ASA-lift would like to resolve, was that it should be easy for a person operating a Machine to order spare parts. The idea was to build a simple mobile solution, that would be easy to use for the end user, and simple to launch without having to refactor existing data systems.

The idea of using a QR

ASA-lift had the idea that they would place a QR code on their Machines, and that the QR should link to a simple mobile phone /web-based solution from where Spare Parts could be requested. The QR should be unique for each Machine, so that the user should just click and directly browse unique parts for his own machine: 1. Scan the QR, 2. Find the part (via drawings), 3. Add the part(s) to a simple cart, 4. Check that owner/user info is updated, 5. Send the request.

A technical challenge

The idea was presented to Dandesign and together we should come up with a solution for this to be implemented. Here mainly one issue needed to be addressed: Data and drawings for each Machine was in PDF format. Since a PDF is not a good base for a web-shop-like feature, we needed to convert it to a use-able data structure. We came up with the idea to use OCR (a technology that recognizes text within a digital image) to recognize and fetch Spare Part IDs from the PDF, which we would then map with a table of all Spare parts. We then tested a simple mobile interface where the user could view the PDF drawing and from there easily request the parts. Everything had to be simple to use from any smartphone, and without a need to login/register. However, as a security measure it was decided that the user had to know the phone number registered for the product.