Training company saves £1000’s per year with bespoke portal solution

The challenge

Outdated booking portal

The majority of the company still used legacy systems to manually book training courses and keep instructors in the loop. Documents would often get lost, duplicated, deleted, or took a while to collaborate on.

 

Staff were finding it a challenge to stay productive and the customer satisfaction was slowly dropping.

 

A&A Training wanted to create a branded user interface that both customers and staff could use with ease.

This solution had the potential to bring in 4 key benefits:

The solution

Implementing our Peardrop framework

We pitched a tailored solution using .NET and our PearDrop portal framework. The new admin portal should give them complete control over security and user permissions. On top of that they wanted enhanced mobile performance, so instructors could collect trainee feedback via a single iPad.

 

For the project, we provided a blended team of developers, testers, and DevOps engineers, as the work required. They also signed up for ongoing software support which gave them access to 24/7 helpdesk support.

The results

Skyrocketed customer satisfaction

Kent County Council responds to climate change with our weather reporting software

The challenge

Legacy application modernisation was needed

With severe weather events predicted to increase due to climate change, it’s imperative to gather actionable data on the phenomenon. This is especially true for public bodies such as local councils.

 

For this reason, Kent County Council has developed a strategy to prepare for severe weather including flooding, storms, and heatwaves. This requires creating a climate change impact assessment to identify how the council can improve its response.

 

However, the council’s SWIMS weather reporting software was not collecting the volume of data needed to properly inform a response. The reason for this was an unintuitive interface that hindered non-technical users. In turn, this was preventing the council from preparing effectively for future weather events.

 

On top of the difficult interface, the weather reporting software also lacked scalability. With severe weather events on the rise, it was important that the software could handle larger volumes of data.

 

And if our solution proved successful, the council wanted the option of rolling it out to other public bodies in the future. Therefore they needed a weather data analytics development solution that was easy to replicate, modify, and scale.

The solution

Delivering a new weather reporting system

Having impressed the council with our response to their invitation to tender, egforit was chosen to deliver the project.

 

We proposed rebuilding the SWIMS weather reporting software in .NET and hosting it in Microsoft Azure. With Azure’s fully maintained and scalable cloud services, this would ensure long-term value for the software.

 

Overall, the weather reporting system had the following features:

 

• data entry with fields such as text, numbers, dropdown lists, and check boxes
• data analysis allowing users to produce custom reports based on their roles
• the ability to easily export data in .xlsx, .docx and .pdf formats

 

At the same time, the system had to reflect the council’s administrative structure (from high to low): county, organisation, and service. Each of these levels was reflected in a different user type with different permissions in the software:

 

1. administrator: can send out county-wide notifications, run reports on system usage, and edit the categories users select
2. enhanced user: can access and report on data within their organisation, and delete users in line with GDPR legislation
3. standard user: can only access data within and run reports about their service

 

Furthermore, the solution had to comply with EU and Egypt , middle east data hosting standards, as well as being secure and password-protected.

 

Our software engineers delivered the project according to the agile development methodology. This meant meeting with the client regularly to get feedback to incorporate into the next “sprint” of work. Using Jira project management tools, we let the council’s stakeholders track our work in real time. This approach ensured that we used our time effectively and were able to make any desired adjustments.

 

Overall, some core features of the development work were:

 

• database development
• security, access, and permissions development
• event creation
• enquiry and maintenance screens development
• UI development and improvement based on user feedback
• dashboard development
• report development
• data extract controls development

The benefits

Helping Kent weather the storm

National institution gains a ‘golden’ view of HR with our golden data management service

The challenge

HR data was hard to manage

At the time of this project, the organisation relied heavily on HR records that were strewn with duplicate and inaccurate data. The HR team was in desperate need of a way to cleanse and unify this data. 

 

The drawbacks of working from disparate data sources were:

 

• duplicated data led to HR inaccuracies
• regulatory risk of mishandling HR documents
• tracking down HR data was time intensive

 

The organisation needed a data storage solution that would be able to meet the regulatory requirements of the business confidently. It was also important for the client to quickly identify and resolve duplicate data. Finally, the client needed a process that could report on the percentage of records containing data within certain identified fields

 

Essentially, the organisation needed to find ways to:

 

• save time searching for personnel data
• reduce human error in their HR operations

 

It was clear that efficient data management solutions were needed to overcome these HR challenges.

The solution

Building a new data management platform

The client was aware of our reputation as portal development experts. This made us the clear choice to build the client’s HR data portal solution.

 

We designed and delivered a digital business platform and underlying ETL workload that provided access to the “golden record” of data. The workload also prepared the data for migration to Oracle HCM Cloud Platform via the creation of a “Data Stewardship Portal”.

 

With the new portal, key metrics and data were exposed to aid data process. Users could view suggested potential matches of people from the different source systems and could amend them accordingly. These features combined help the client determine the ‘golden record’ of information.

The benefits

A go-to source for trusted data

Religious body reduces data risks and improves HR efficiency with golden record MDM solution

The challenge

Lack of HR data integration created risk and inefficiency

Being an institution with millions of devotees and thousands of employees brings many responsibilities. First of all, the leadership must inspire trust among its congregation and its staff. Secondly, the organisation must remain economically viable. And finally, the organisation must find new ways of attracting and engaging its flock.

 

But to achieve these points, our client needed access to complete, accurate, and secure organisational data. This realisation led them on a quest to identify and integrate any IT systems that were hindering their modernisation.

 

One such area in need of integration was the organisation’s personnel data. HR, payroll, pensions, and clergy records were held in three on-premise systems: ResourceLink, Civica UPM, and a proprietary staff database. Inconsistent data entry over the years meant that these records suffered from duplication and inaccuracy.

 

These disparate systems led to a waste of time and effort, as the HR team could not find all the information they needed in one place. There was also a high risk of error when manually transferring data between these three systems. And furthermore, the proliferation of software made it challenging to ensure data security.

 

To summarise, the downsides of these unintegrated HR systems were:

 

• reputational and regulatory risk of insecure HR data
• wasted time and effort of duplicate data across multiple systems
• high cost of maintaining multiple on-premise systems

 

For the sake of the client’s reputation and efficiency, it was clear that these systems required HR data integration.

The solution

Cleansing with a golden record MDM portal

Data analysis, cleansing, and de-duplication have been a key feature of many of our systems integration solutions. Some examples include the merging of global customer databases for publisher Elsevier, the de-duplication of royalties data for Hachette Publishing, and the creation of a unified GDPR application for NewDay Cards. Impressed by these relevant examples, the institution asked egforit Software to provide an HR data integration solution.

 

We used our experience of extract, transform, load (ETL) integration services to migrate the data into an HR data management portal. After migration, we used this portal to create a set of cleansed and de-duplicated data, known as a golden record. This now provided the organisation with a single set of standardised information for each member of staff, covering HR, payroll, and pensions.

 

Our team in this project comprised a chief architect, a lead consultant, and supporting software engineers. Working in agile sprints, we shared our progress with the client’s stakeholders every two weeks. This allowed us to include any desired changes and overcome any unexpected obstacles with time to spare.

 

Taking fewer than 90 man-days, our systems integration team completed the project within the agreed timeframe. Using the HR golden record data we created, the client was in a good position to transfer its HR processes to a single piece of software.

The benefits

Paving the way for cloud-based HR