Michael Graupner

Going from paper to the future

Elko Schmid in Zwickau needed a future-proof and ISO 9001-compliant way of ensuring the quality of its products. In 2021 they asked me to develop a new production management and control system. This system consists of several modules, ranging from an interface to their ERP system to views for managing the production process and monitoring the quality process.

Each worker is equipped with his own tablet on which he can control production progress and enter data required for quality management.

The system is independent from the operating system and runs on Linux servers, Windows clients, Android tablets and a Raspberry Pi.

Since it's initial launch, the system has been expanded with several new modules and is contributing to the company's continued success.

Transforming mobility

When Mer Germany GmbH (former E-WALD GmbH) in Teisnach launched their business, they hoped to bring mobility into the 21st century. They did this by launching two groundbreaking services, the introduction of e-car charging stations in rural areas and e-car sharing. I was involved in both services from the beginning.

I created a monitoring service to guarantee the uptime of these chargers, made them work in a secure environment inside of VPNs, connected them via LTE in remote areas and moved the incident management into Jira so that everyone involved could access the data in a structured way. To make them more resilient and indepenent from the manufacturers, I implemented a custom proxy system these chargers connected to and passed the data to the final backend. This opened up a lot of possibilities for creating new services.

For the e-car sharing I built the entire software stack, front-end (responsive and usable on mobile and desktop) and back-end, the connection to the e-car sharing platform provider and administrative tools for the employees involved. This platform has generated tens of thousands of bookings and is still in use after over 8 years (at a new owner).

My services have been crucial to the growth of the business and supported all their IT operations until 2023.

Transforming mobility - part 2

One particularly interesting project was the city of Borgholzhausen's eCarsharing project in Germany. This town has a train station outside the town centre and wanted to enable passengers to travel to the centre and other outlying parts of the town by electric car (like a bus line, but whenever the user wanted and driven by themselves), thus reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.

I was responsible for implementing the software to do this. I created the necessary applications to interface with the platform provider, provide an API for another application to ingest car availability data and allow end users to create and manage their bookings and generate statistics on the usage of the whole project. The hard part was adding this functionality on top of an existing model that was not very flexible and working with a lot of stakeholders with different needs. In the end we were successful and usage is growing steadily, with hundreds of bookings per month.

Traditional car sharing (with electric cars) and ride-sharing solutions have also been added to the range of transport options available. The solution also included software for the staff to manage the cars and their bookings. For research purposes, the movement of the cars needed to be recorded, so I created a GPS tracking solution where each car was equipped with a GPS tracker with an internet connection that transmitted its location in real time to a GPS backend where the data was stored and could be visualised.

In the middle of the project, Mer Germany GmbH sold the car sharing part of the business to Mainova AG/Hop-On, which meant a change of the platform provider and therefore a considerable amount of software had to be altered. This was a challenging project in itself, but one that I successfully completed.

Read more about the project here. — The project was featured on one of the major German TV channels.