DuPont Diagnostics takes food safety test results mobile with Xamarin.Forms

Highlights

• Enabled sales and customer service professionals to respond more quickly to customer requests

• Expanded the utility of a key product line of DuPont Diagnostics, a part of DuPont Nutrition & Health

• Achieved rapid rollout and return on investment with a familiar, easy user experience

• Developed an internal solution with the flexibility to achieve additional business opportunities in the future

DuPont Diagnostics, located in Wilm-ington, Delaware, provides innovative, science-based microbial detection and monitoring solutions for the food industry. These products are used by food processors, contract laboratories and government agencies worldwide to help reduce the impact of pathogens, such as Salmonella, E. coli or Listeria,

About DuPont Diagnosticsand other unwanted organisms in raw ingredients, finished products and manufacturing environments.

The most well-known solution available from DuPont Diagnostics is the award-winning DuPont™ BAX® System, the first automated pathogen detection system to use PCR technology in the commercial food industry. The BAX® System instrument not only amplifies bacterial DNA, but also automatically detects the presence or absence of the target pathogen to provide clear yes-or-no results in an electronic format that require no advanced interpretation.

“The response to our mobile app has been overwhelmingly positive. Every customer who has seen it says, ‘I want that, too.’”Jeffrey Rohrbeck, Systems Development Group Manager Diagnostics, DuPont Nutrition & Health

For DuPont Diagnostics, food safety testing is the key area of business. The business’ BAX® System is designed to detect pathogens such as Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria in food and food production environments. Once a test is completed, the instrument generates a flat file, which is typically sent around to employees for analysis on a desktop application.

Unfortunately, this meant that if salespeople or technicians wanted to access a file to verify a potential contaminated lot, they would have

Taking food safety test data mobileto wait until they could get to a computer. This could result in several hours of delay in getting back to a customer about a potentially critical issue.

In order to facilitate more responsive customer service and faster response times, the company decided to develop a mobile application that would enable personnel to access test results anywhere, whether on the road at a customer location or after hours working from home.

While DuPont is a very large company, the Systems Development Group inside the DuPont Diagnostics is a small team. Jeffrey Rohrbeck, Systems Development Group Manager, was the sole developer responsible for the project, which meant maximum efficiency was paramount to achieving the project’s goals.

Within DuPont Diagnostics, the sales team and customer service representa-tives primarily use iPhones and the iOS platform for customer communications. This made targeting iOS the obvious first choice. However, instead of devel-oping directly in iOS, the company chose to use Xamarin for two key reasons.

“We are a Visual Studio shop,” says Rohrbeck. “We use C++ and C# to develop our applications, and we wanted to be able to reuse that exper-tise rather than learning an entirely new approach to coding.” Additionally,

Rapid, flexible cross-platform development with Xamarin

the company wanted the flexibility to adapt the application to future uses inside and outside of the company, which is a choice that has proven to be strategically wise.

In order to streamline development even further and prepare for potential cross-platform opportunities in the future, the company opted to use Xamarin.Forms, which enables developers to build native UIs for iOS, Android, and Windows from a single, shared C# codebase.

Once Rohrbeck decided to use Xamarin, he signed up for both Xamarin Evolve, the largest cross-platform develop-ment event in the world, and Xamarin University, Xamarin’s live, interactive mobile development training program. This two-pronged approach helped him

Getting ahead with expert Xamarin training

rapidly gain the expertise he needed to develop a high-quality application. “I came to Xamarin Evolve with a bunch of ideas and questions and I was able to get very specific feedback straight from the source,” says Rohrbeck. “I found the experts at Xamarin to be very accessible.”

The BAX® System desktop application was written in C#, the same language used to create native Xamarin applications across mobile platforms. This allowed Rohrbeck to reuse a significant amountof code from the existing tool, saving valuable time and effort.

Reusing desktop code not only saved development time, it also supported the creation of a familiar user experience. “Because we modeled the mobile user experience on the existing desktop application, it made it easy for people to use the tool right away,” says Rohrbeck.

Overall, Rohrbeck has found that Xamarin has delivered on his initial expectations and beyond. “It’s really nice to find a platform that does exactly what it says it does. I was incredibly impressed with how easy it was to create high-quality software using Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms, and equally happy with the level of support I’ve gotten along the way.”

Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development. No other platform enables businesses to reach all major devices across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows with 100% fully native apps from a single code base. With Xamarin, businesses standardize mobile app development in C#, share an average of 75% source code across platforms, and leverage their existing skills, teams, tools and code to rapidly deliver great apps with broad reach. Xamarin is used by more than 100 Fortune 500 companies in 120 countries, and has over one million unique developer downloads. For more information, please visit xamarin.com, read our blog, and follow us on Twitter @xamarinhq.

Reusing desktop code for greater mobile productivity

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Because the application was written to accommodate a multi-platform approach, it has significant potential to deliver value beyond its initial internal deployment. “The response to our mobile app has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Rohrbeck. “Every customer who has seen it says, ‘I want that, too,’ so now there’s a move to get this out to the public.” The company is exploring the possibility of an Android version of the application and may leverage Xamarin Test Cloud to affordably and easily test the multitude of Android devices on the market.

“It’s not hard to justify the cost when you look at the time Xamarin saves.”

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Jeffrey Rohrbeck, Systems Development Group Manager Diagnostics, DuPont Nutrition & Health