
01
Design
App development
The customer
As a textile industry world leader that was founded over a hundred years ago, Van de Wiele aims to shape its industries future from yarn to finished product.
They design, build and integrate innovative textile systems for flooring qualities, home linen, fashion fabrics and technical textiles.
02
The challenge
To manage and control the weaving process of their carpet and velvet looms in an optimal way, they have been building custom desktop software named We@velink for over 20 years.
With an ever-growing customer base worldwide, the effort and cost related to installing, updating and customizing multiple versions of the system lead them to rethink their strategy.
Pegus Digital was asked to help rethink We@velink’s configuration process and come up with a usable alternative for overly complex interfaces.

03
The solution
Enter TexConnect, a user friendly hybrid cloud application (SaaS) aiming to enable their customers’ on premise machinery to be managed and controlled from any system that is connected to the internet, and relieving Van de Wiele from the deployment and maintenance burden of its predecessor.
Submerging ourselves in the quite complex domain of the weaving industry with several event storming sessions, we gradually built an initial backlog of user stories, used as conversation starters for building minimal versions of new solutions during the first couple of iterations.

Initially we focused on enabling production planners and managers to set up and maintain reusable textile data building blocks, which are all the things that are needed before being able to start creating actual production orders. Ranging from a simple yarn with its color and fabric, to the complex definitions of how a carpet needs to be finished further along the processing line or the huge creels that feed the weaving looms.
With a first version of those in place and tools for managing a library of designs and machines, the first steps towards a new way of building and planning production schedules, a giant puzzle of carpets that is eventually produced by the loom, are gradually being realised.

Progressive web app
TexConnect’s front-end is built as a progressive web application with Google’s Angular framework.
The backend
The backend, being built by Van de Wiele, is a set of .NET Core microservices hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
At Pegus Digital we found the necessary web experts to develop our ideas. From the start of the project, they started thinking about how to shape those ideas even better. Thanks to the use of specific techniques such as event storming, the team was able to efficiently understand the complexity of our previous application and new functions were quickly added, resulting in the final next-gen user-friendly and maintainable cloud application.
Marnix Loncke
R&D manager software, Vandewiele