Altereo built idBAC on Jmix to streamline wastewater compliance inspections for municipalities

Customer

Altereo is a French software company building solutions for water utilities and municipalities. Their team develops applications that must adapt to local regulations and diverse customer processes, while remaining maintainable long-term.

Product

idBAC is a compliance platform focused on wastewater inspections. It supports real-world workflows such as inspections triggered by construction, property sales and recurring checks every few years — performed by field agents and managed by administrative teams.

Challenge

Altereo’s previous approach was heavily map-first: the primary interaction started from GIS and moved to object details. In practice, inspection teams work around schedules (agenda), cases, and forms, with the map being helpful but not the center of the job. That mismatch created friction for users and pushed the team toward more custom development than they wanted.

They needed a platform that would:

• accelerate delivery of a new product (greenfield),

• keep business logic on the backend (not scattered across frontend code),

• provide strong conventions and out-of-the-box enterprise building blocks,

• support deep data models and large inspection forms (hundreds of questions / thousands of fields),

• enable customization per municipality without turning into a maintenance nightmare.

Why Jmix

Altereo chose Jmix for its productivity-first approach and conventions that reduce boilerplate, allowing the team to focus on domain logic instead of rebuilding standard app foundations. The project started as a Kotlin-first greenfield application.

Solution

With Jmix, Altereo built idBAC as a workflow-driven “administrative application” for inspections and compliance decision-making — while keeping GIS as a supporting capability.

Key elements of the solution:

Implementation snapshot

The backend architecture manages all 100+ entities with automatic creation and modification timestamping, where Jmix Studio generated the initial views while custom business logic lives in entity event handlers and background jobs. The team made a deliberate choice to skip BPM tooling, keeping the codebase lean by enforcing workflows through state machines and validation logic rather than external orchestration. Custom Apache POI integration handles complex Excel operations that preserve multi-level entity relationships during bulk data migration, which proved critical for initial system setup and periodic data exchanges.

The platform implements a multi-tenancy model where each university operates as an isolated tenant, with administrators using the full backend interface while field staff access a streamlined WeChat mini-program. Bulk account provisioning keeps onboarding efficient, and permission inheritance from the tenant level simplifies access control. The notification architecture leverages WeChat messaging instead of traditional email, delivering task assignments, alerts, and updates directly in the platform users are already monitoring throughout the day.

The mobile experience bridges physical and digital operations through QR code scanning and NFC tag reading, allowing staff to instantly pull up location details and equipment records without manual lookups during patrols and inspections. The IoT pipeline completes the integration picture, with REST webhooks from fire alarms, pressure sensors, and other monitoring equipment feeding directly into the incident management workflow to trigger alerts and create service tickets automatically.

Production Impact

The platform currently runs in production at two major Chinese universities - Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Chengdu University of Technology - where it serves over 300 active users daily across security staff, administrators, and service teams. The system processes more than 2,000 daily operations including patrol logs, incident reports, visitor registrations, and equipment checks, demonstrating its capacity to handle real-world operational load at scale.

What makes this implementation particularly sustainable is the development continuity model, where junior students inherit the codebase and add new features under faculty supervision. This approach not only demonstrates the maintainability of the architecture and effectiveness of knowledge transfer, but ensures the platform evolves with changing campus security needs while providing hands-on learning opportunities for successive cohorts of computer science students.