About the project

Skilltech is a utility contractor delivering metering and field support service to some of the largest gas, electricity and water companies in Australia, such as Essential Energy, SA Water and Western Power. These significant partnerships meant handling substantial quantities of meter reading data to be processed, as well as managing the employee data of a sizeable workforce.

One huge achievement for me happened in the early months of my career at Skilltech. I was asked to design and develop an entirely new consumer-facing application that facilitated the collection of residential utility data. This application was used to gather data from residential customers themselves, process the information through our administrative system and then transmit it to the commercial utility services for billing purposes. Allowing the consumer to report their own data would solve the issue of a meter reading being incorrectly documented or skipped due to a physical obstruction or restraint, resulting an an estimate reading being provided in its stead.

Development Process

I was responsible for bringing the consumer-facing application to life from the ground up. Starting with wireframes and design concepts, I created the entire user interface in React — building every layout, component, and visual element myself to ensure a clean, intuitive experience. On the backend, I developed and integrated all APIs using Express, a Node.js framework, to handle everything from data retrieval to submission. Throughout the process, I paid close attention to aligning the app’s look and feel with the wider business system, creating a consistent and cohesive experience across platforms.

The creation of this tool streamlined the data collection process, improving efficiency and accuracy in utility billing operations. Some caveats came up in handling different user devices with different versions of operation systems installed, and extensive testing was necessary to overcome this. Additionally, unforeseen loopholes meant I needed to craft elegant solutions for data validation. For example, identifying image metadata to ensure the meter photo provided was taken within 24 hours to verify the reading was recent. Despite this, overall, the entire rollout of this new application went rather smoothly and was deemed a success.