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:

Agenda-first workflow for field agents

Agents primarily operate from schedules and case lists, not from map navigation. Each case aggregates inspection history, stakeholders, and the structured inspection process

Inspection forms at scale

idBAC includes complex forms with extensive questionnaires and data structures. The team highlighted the importance of a solid data model to support “object → children → children of children” scenarios and keep the UI manageable.

Customer-specific UI tailoring

Municipalities vary in their processes, so the product supports tailoring without forking:

• hiding irrelevant sections (e.g., invoices where billing isn’t used),
• renaming fields and tabs,
• changing screen layout and ordering,
• customizing dictionaries / value lists.

Reports and communication

The team uses reporting to generate letters and documents, and designed the UX so users see only relevant report templates in context rather than searching through long lists.

Dashboards and analytics

After login, users can access analytics dashboards (using Superset) before moving into operational workflows.

Maps where they matter

GIS remains important: territories, object locations and status visualization (e.g., compliant/non-compliant). The difference is that maps complement the workflow instead of defining it.

Implementation snapshot