After completing my third year, I secured an internship at Unmesh Summer Internship Program 2014 by CESC Limited. In about 6 weeks, I developed the Bill Delivery Monitoring System. It is one of the most complex and real-time web applications that I have ever created. The system became immensely popular, and was instantly moved to production. I won the best intern award that summer.
Bill Delivery Monitoring System
Award winning web-application project to monitor the timely printing and delivery of electricity bills to consumers.
FOR: CESC Limited, Kolkata, India (Internship, then full-time employment)
WHEN: Jun – Jul ’14: Development • Aug ’15 – Jul ’17: New features, maintenance.
WITH: Souvik Bhattacharya
Outline
A web-application to monitor the timely printing and delivery of monthly electricity bills and notices (defaulter’s bills) to consumers.
Salient Features
- Three kinds of users – CESC Officials, Bill Printing Vendor, and Bill Delivery (Courier) Vendor – with different sets of use cases via common login.
- Granular monitoring of bill printing (three events) and bill delivery (three events) in sequence.
- Automated SMSs sent to consumers when their bills are calculated, and are out for delivery.
- For ease of interaction and reduce input mistakes, textboxes have not been used. The main process flow is merely a series of button clicks.
- Website is fully responsive and mobile friendly – first of its kind to be implemented for the company in 2014. Courier Partners have benefitted the most, as they can tap the buttons easily in their phones / tablets, while on the road, delivering bills.
- The application won the Best Project Award at Unmesh 2014 Summer Internship Program
Technical Wrap-up
- Whole back end implemented using JSP-Servlets and Java Classes.
- Designed SQL schema for high scalability and robustness.
- Designed an intuitive front-end for easy tracking of bill delivery, and associated miscellaneous reports.
- Automated SMSs are sent to hundreds of consumers using dedicated SMS gateway, which are triggered for certain events.
- System is live for over 2.5 years, with approx. 100,000 database hits per day from different users.
Technologies Used:
Login page only, as system is live, and access is restricted.
Best Internship Project Award
The Winner Award for developing the Bill Delivery Monitoring System (then known as Courier Monitoring System) while still a 3rd year undergraduate student. The system was made live immediately upon completion, for about 2.9 million consumers.
