Sustainability Data Management and Reporting Platform

Project size

5 MMs

Industry

Environment

Scope of work

Full-stack Website Development

Technologies

Database: PostgreSQL
Backend: Hasura, GraphQL, AWS

Frontend: Vue.js, Quasar Framework

About the project

The client is an environmental consultant based in Australia who advises businesses and corporations on sustainable practices. She needed to upgrade an existing web application used for managing sustainability actions, collecting environmental data, and generating visual reports. The goal was to build a powerful, user-friendly platform that saves organizations time and cost while enabling them to plan, track, and report on their sustainability initiatives.

The platform is designed to help users synthesize data, monitor progress, and publish sustainability reports with actionable insights and rich visualizations.

The client required a comprehensive platform upgrade with the following key capabilities:

Action Management: Allow organizations to plan and assign sustainability tasks to staff with clear due dates, locations, and contextual messages.
Real-Time Notifications & Tracking: Notify staff of new assignments and allow them to monitor task progress under categorized views (e.g., My Actions, Assigned, Completed).
Data Collection & Metric Tracking: Automatically collect environmental metrics (e.g., invoice-based data) and organize them by category.
Data Visualization: Enable users to generate custom graphs and visualizations based on tracked metrics.
Automated Report Generation: Synthesize metrics into comprehensive sustainability reports, exportable for internal use or public display on corporate websites.
User-Friendly Interface: Ensure ease of use for both administrators and staff, supporting engagement and seamless navigation.

The project began with minimal documentation, making it difficult to establish a clear understanding of system requirements and technical constraints. Specific challenges included:

Lack of Specifications: There were no formal design documents or detailed requirements, which required close client collaboration to extract actionable development tasks.
Ambiguity in System Behavior: Key details related to existing workflows and expected outputs were vague, requiring iterative clarification and prototype-based validation.

BHSOFT adopted an agile and consultative development approach:

Discovery and Task Breakdown: The team worked closely with the client to clarify unclear areas and break down the overall requirements into manageable tasks.
Collaborative Iteration: The client remained actively involved in testing and verifying each task. Feedback loops were built into every stage of development to ensure alignment with expectations.
Technology Integration: Using Vue.js and the Quasar Framework, we built a dynamic, responsive front end. Hasura and GraphQL powered the real-time backend logic, supported by PostgreSQL for structured data storage and AWS for infrastructure scalability.
Feature Development: We focused on building modular, scalable features including:
- Topic-based action assignment and tracking
- Automated metric capture and categorization
- Graph generation and export functionality
- Report synthesis and publication-ready output

The upgraded platform delivered significant value by:

Enabling organizations to track sustainability actions in real-time.
Automating the process of synthesizing environmental metrics into clear, impactful reports.
Improving collaboration between staff and administrators with integrated notifications and task tracking.
Enhancing transparency and credibility through shareable sustainability reporting tools.

This custom solution now serves as a powerful tool for organizations committed to sustainability, offering a seamless way to manage initiatives, visualize impact, and communicate environmental progress.

Key Features of the Platform

Sustainability Action Management: Grouped by topic, each action comes with clear instructions and can be assigned with specific due dates and locations.
User Notification System: Staff are automatically notified when assigned new actions, with categorized task views for better tracking.
Automated Metric Capture: Environmental data from invoices and other inputs are captured, categorized, and used to populate dashboards.
Custom Graphs & Infographics: Users can generate a wide range of visualizations to explore and present performance data.
Sustainability Report Builder: Automatically synthesized reports summarize reductions, outcomes, and environmental impact. Reports are exportable and shareable online.