Zynka

About the company

Located in Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Malmö, Zynka BIM offers Architectural Services and transforms how buildings are designed, constructed, and operated. 

Their primary goals are to create more efficient work processes in digitizing buildings and minimize errors which, in the long run, results in a lesser time and cost-consuming building life cycle.

The challenges

Business challenge:

Covering a vast area of business, Zynka was facing several digital challenges. 

1. They needed an admin panel for their projects and employees to track and organize their work better. 

2. Zynka needed a platform to withstand importing large-scale 3D scans of objects such as residential or business buildings. In addition, they wanted to be able to make accurate snapshots of buildings over time.

Technical challenge:

The project resembled an R&D project more than anything else. There were many different third-party products and services that we needed to integrate with and have them work in sync. 

Some of them were cutting edge, such as an AI camera that could detect a person falling in a building. This was relevant as we played with the idea of implementing this in elderly homes. Over time we realized that some of these technologies were premature and had to be removed.

Before we helped Zynka build the platform to digitalize the infrastructure of the building, they had to rely on AutoCAD renders or even project plans that did not necessarily show the end placement of, for example, electrical, heating, and plumbing installations in the building.

The solution

We used the Laravel framework and NodeJS hybrid to create the admin panel. Since its creation in 2011, Laravel has proven itself as a reliable and stable framework that enterprises can use. As a result, we were able to implement RBAC (role-based access control) over resources without problems, creating a unique multi-tenant solution that ultimately enabled scaling to more clients. 

We've chosen Kafka as the primary messaging queue system and the slave NodeJS application. The application helped us generate access tokens for the 3rd party system that needed to be integrated as a part of the back end. 

The main goal was to build an efficient, multipurpose solution and secure the integration of third-party systems into Zynka's. As the client needed specialized solutions, we opted for Laravel as a base PHP for a custom web application. Laravel also gave us all the creative room we needed. 

We created portable 3D view renderers, which were then embedded into the client applications, giving different views of 3D floor plans. To summarize in an apprehensible way, the application allowed setting points of interest in 3D spaces that tied assets from a catalog. 

In translation, the Zynka team can quickly locate hidden assets (valves, pipes, power boxes) and tell exactly where they are and their technical details. 

A platform is a valuable tool across several industries, as it is a revolutionary way of managing how buildings are designed, constructed, and operated. 

After all, wouldn't you like to see your complete building internally and externally at all times, just a click away?
 

Technology

As mentioned above, we used Laravel as a base PHP framework for the most significant part of the project. 

We've chosen Laravels passport to implement the OAuth2 authentication service. To make the 3rd party integration and authorization work seamlessly, we used Node.js worker. 

We decided to use Vue.js for the front-end technology as it blends nicely with Laravel. However, we made the 3D renderers framework agnostic. That way, they can serve their purpose even with plain HTML.

We had iOS and Android applications built in Xamarin, serving as alert endpoints for end users. 

We used Python to process alerts and notifications from sensors inside buildings. 

Overall it was a neatly packed technology stack made for multiple endpoints.