Bobcat Machine IQ: Digging Into User Security with Ionic Enterprise
How Doosan Bobcat developed a comprehensive, multi-faceted, and seamless app to elevate and transform the Bobcat user experience.
For years, Doosan Bobcat has been a global leader in the compact equipment industry, and for good reason.
Bobcat has always had a single, overarching goal in mind: to offer products and services that empower its customers to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently.
Bobcat equipment users take on some of the most challenging and rewarding work in construction, agriculture, landscaping and several other industries. As a result, their machines must be properly cared for and adequately secured to maintain product longevity and user peace of mind.
To ensure that users were set up for long-term success, the Bobcat team got to work to create an app that would allow customers to monitor their equipment from anywhere revolutionizing the way users interact with their machines.
The Challenge
While building their app, called Machine IQ, the Bobcat team sought out a way to offer a wide range of future-forward features, such as location tracking, hour tracking, maintenance progress, and even insightful reporting tools.
“[Customers] can protect their equipment through mechanisms such as setting curfews, or being notified if a machine is started outside of general working hours,” explained Brandon Bakke, a solution architect at Doosan Bobcat, describing the team’s vision. “They can set up geofencing maps—if the machine moves outside of a certain geographic location, the owner is immediately notified.”
However, this proved to be a deeply complicated task. Bobcat needed to find a solution that would allow them to develop and sustain these robust features without compromising customer security.
Ionic Enterprise helped us with some of the [most challenging] problems. Things like authentication with our identity providers and authorization, that would be more challenging for us to build ourselves.
Brandon Bakke, a solution architect at Doosan Bobcat
The Solution
Bobcat engineers turned to Ionic’s Enterprise Package to solve their most complicated production issues—with no stress and a minimal learning curve.
“Ionic Enterprise helped us with some of the [most challenging] problems,” explained Bakke. “Things like authentication with our identity providers and authorization, that would be more challenging for us to build ourselves.”
Using Identity Vault and Auth Connect, two of Ionic’s best-in-class security features, the Bobcat team was able to ensure that their app would leverage platform native security features, and best practices with minimal development effort. To help usability even further, the team also created a push notification feature to alert customers by email or text when their equipment was found beyond geofenced areas.
By integrating with Ionic’s native plugins, the Bobcat team was able to build this application with the same teams they use to develop their web solutions. This decision helped to maintain the unique look and feel of native mobile apps—a key component, according to Bakke.
Because Ionic’s Enterprise Package is built to help enterprise teams accelerate their application production (including those significant pieces surrounding security and authentication), it proved to be the ideal solution for Bobcat’s needs.
The Result
With the use of Ionic’s many capabilities, Bobcat leveraged enterprise plugins, push notifications, and more to accelerate their time to market. Backed by Ionic’s customer support experts, Bobcat was able to roll out the Machine IQ app at lightning speed—exponentially surpassing time to market expectations.
“We were able to start and have a fully-featured mobile application working within six months,” said Bakke.
In addition, Bobcat has been able to reduce infrastructure costs related to keeping current with SDK and XCODE updates by shifting to the cloud with Ionic Appflow. Appflow is a mobile DevOps solution for teams and businesses building apps with any mobile architecture.
After Machine IQ’s successful launch in October of 2021, Bobcat customers now enjoy access to real-time information surrounding health, maintenance, security, and performance of each connected machine.
And, according to Bakke, the job isn’t done yet: “We’re looking forward to continuing to evolve the app, and integrating more features in the future.”