Cadulis software technology at the service of your teams

Cadulis leverages many cutting-edge technologies.
Below you will find some information about a few of them, to give you a clearer idea.

Scalability

Do you find that Cadulis works very well? So do we :) But thanks to this top-notch organization, your business is growing and you may be wondering if Cadulis will remain just as responsive? Rest assured, our architecture is scalable, meaning that server resources adapt according to demand. We have conducted tests by injecting up to 10,000 interventions simultaneously.

However, a growing company requires a specific organization to compartmentalize activities and teams. Here again, Cadulis provides the tools to help you.

Performance

Responsiveness is one of the key demands from our clients. Nobody wants to wait, even just a few seconds, for a page to load. Here are the strategies we have implemented to make our application completely smooth and frictionless:

An automatically scalable system. With Kubernetes hosting, the Cadulis infrastructure adapts its own resources to user needs. During off-peak periods (holidays, specific times of the day/night), hosting costs decrease. These savings are reflected in our pricing. Most processes have been made asynchronous and fault-tolerant. For example, sending an automatic email after closing an intervention can be performed a few minutes after closure if the system is under heavy load. In case of an error, Cadulis retries the sending a bit later. This way, you can continue your activity without experiencing unpleasant slowdowns. With input from our clients, we have been able to define certain processes as lower priority. Efficient calculation funnels. Imagine the number of calculations required to determine the best time slot for your intervention: you need to check all the slots of all your technicians, calculate distances and travel times between all interventions, and compute all profitability metrics! Yet, the time slot proposal identifies the most profitable field workers and slots in just a few seconds. Two tricks make this possible: extrapolated travel time calculation (see the section on travel time below) and a funnel that quickly eliminates field workers who are too far away, lack the right skills, or whose schedules are already full. Caching. Our users (activity managers or field workers) often visit the same page multiple times. In these cases, the page is cached, which prevents the system from recalculating travel time, distance, profitability data, etc., every time it is opened. Part of this caching system is also what enables Cadulis to be used offline. (See the article on offline mode.)

Travel Time Estimation

A correction coefficient has allowed us to solve a fairly common problem: how to make a simple calculation while maintaining accuracy. The calculation in question is determining travel time from the GPS coordinates of two points. GPS coordinates can give us the straight-line distance—by taking the Earth’s curvature into account, the calculation is precise and extremely fast. But from there, how do you determine the actual or even approximate travel time without using an external mapping system, which is very costly in precious calculation seconds? These calls, lasting about 0.2s, make up the largest share of calculation time. What does travel time depend on? Mainly the density of road infrastructures such as highways and expressways near the field worker’s starting point. To convert straight-line distance to travel time, we use a correction coefficient, which initially takes a low value for each field worker. With this value, a maximum number of field workers pass the filtering steps of the time slot proposal, and as a result, for the first calls (often made during testing), response times are not fully optimized. Each time a call to a third-party mapping system is actually made for this field worker, the coefficient is adjusted based on real traffic data. After a few calls, each field worker has a realistic coefficient and the time slot proposal filters retain only the most relevant field workers for making the calls.

Blockchain

With cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, and blockchain, these have become buzzwords. Yet, beyond the financial sector, this technology can truly provide solutions to issues we encounter daily.

For example, in our field intervention planning and optimization application, Cadulis, blockchain is a potential solution for securing the digitization of documents. Here’s a concrete example: Imagine a technician coming to install fiber in your apartment. At the end of the intervention, you sign a (paper) document to confirm that the intervention took place. This signature does not guarantee the proper functioning or completion of the intervention, nor does it certify your identity, that you are the apartment owner, or the indirect client of the intervention. Nothing guarantees that the field worker won’t modify the document’s content after signature. Yet, this signature has legal recognition that digital signatures do not yet possess.

However, our digital system inherently provides more security: at the moment of signing, the date is recorded. Every modification is tracked with the recording of the identifier, date, and content of the changes. To go even further, the intervention report (or more precisely, its hash) can be stored in a blockchain. This makes it easy to legally demonstrate that the document is tamper-proof, unforgeable, with a timestamp and even geolocation. This can nip many disputes in the bud. Another concrete example concerns the transport of hazardous waste. Since the producer is responsible for these products until their destruction, blockchain allows them to securely track the journey of the various documents attached to the products being transported.