Influential Software

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.

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.

By collaborating closely with Kent County Council, we succeeded in building a system that was suitable for non-technical staff. This provided an immediate benefit in the form of a more detailed climate change impact assessment.

Our redeveloped SWIMS software tells the council exactly how much climate change has cost in Kent over any given period. This granular ability to capture and analyse climate change costs is unique in the marketplace.

Tullis Russell has been leading the paper and film coating industry for over 200 years. And like many long-established manufacturers, some of its software systems had gradually fallen behind more modern solutions. The manufacturer’s BI setup consisted of a COBOL ERP, Microsoft Excel, and a BI product called Matillion.

The drawbacks of this setup were:

• data for reporting was only refreshed twice a day
• external help was needed to configure new reports
• data was spread across many disparate sources
• the BI software was more costly than alternatives

Due to these disadvantages, the company’s IT and finance departments went in search of a modern alternative. This led Tullis Russell to find Influential’s Power BI consultancy.

Based on the challenges Tullis Russell had described, Influential’s consultants proposed a solution using Power BI integration with Azure.

This solution entailed:

• creating an Azure data pipeline from the COBOL ERP database
• storing the data in an Azure-hosted Azure Synapse Studio data lake
• connecting that data to Power BI via Azure Synapse Analytics

The use of Azure’s serverless cloud meant the company only paid for usage, with no baseline costs. Microsoft also took care of all the IT maintenance.

And most importantly, the new Power BI Azure integration updated the data every 15 minutes. So the finance team could now view the company’s progress in near real-time.

As a company working closely with the NHS, our client spotted a need for easier reporting on healthcare data security. The company aimed to develop the first software designed specifically to report on NHS cyber alerts (formerly called CareCERT).

Ensuring the resulting product was cost-effective and efficient was an absolute priority for the client to market to the NHS. And because the NHS holds sensitive data for millions of people, data security was also paramount.

The company’s search for a healthcare portal development solution led to Influential Software. With 30 years’ experience in business intelligence and software development, our skills matched the requirement.

The brief in this project was to develop a platform that could scan an entire network from a central server. The software then had to compare the results with a list of industry-standard security vulnerabilities. Over time, the client extended the brief to include scanning single devices and a version for personal home use.

Making the resulting product affordable for different NHS trusts was a priority. But the client also needed to ensure the software was easy to navigate for non-technical NHS employees. For this reason we ensured the software had a visually appealing dashboard that displayed easy-to-understand metrics. We also established secure connectivity between on-premise and cloud applications.

Our client is a UK-based manufacturer of high-precision parts used in electrical turbines. At the time of contacting us, this manufacturing client was in a period of expansion. With a second factory set to open imminently, the company realised that ensuring efficient communication across locations was crucial.

However, this efficiency was hindered by the disparate and disorganised use of company documents in the HR and Quality Control departments. Employees used a range of unconnected applications to complete their daily tasks. But with new staff due to start at the second factory, HR had to rise to the challenge quickly.

Based on our reputation as expert SharePoint consultants, the company contacted Influential Software to develop an intranet proof of concept (POC). Because the management was weighing up other intranet options, this POC was an important step in convincing them about SharePoint.

Our consultants also gave a fully costed analysis of the alternatives to SharePoint, and how we would carry out the implementation. And once the company had agreed to our POC proposal, we developed the required functionality in a matter of days.

Seeing our manufacturing intranet solution, both users and management at the company were convinced that SharePoint was the way forward. This paved the way for a planned roll-out of SharePoint across the company.

To summarise, the benefits of SharePoint implementation for manufacturing are:

• a single point of entry for all-important Quality Control documents
• enterprise-grade security, whether on-premises or in the cloud
• improved speed, accuracy, and transparency in document management
• enabling collaboration across business departments and locations

Our client had recently sold its beauty division and was looking for ways to migrate the intellectual property to the buyer seamlessly. However, the client needed a guarantee that its own employees would not have access to the sites after the transition of ownership. It was also important that the data remained intact and uncorrupted during the migration. Another factor was ensuring that the intranet would not be damaged or crash during this process. 

After reviewing the sites and directories, there were over 400 locations to be moved across and have their access rights changed. It was important that the sites being moved over remained intact on both the front- and back-end.

To make the process as efficient as possible, we started moving the content before the official divestment date. This gave us more room to check that every site’s permissions had changed and the content was migrated over in time. It was important for the client that the buyer could take over the intranet immediately.

In order for a smooth transition to take place, we needed to:

• analyse affected areas and directories 
• rework the existing access rights
• migrate content from the intranet

The primary benefit of this portal solution was that the intranet was split quickly and flawlessly. The client didn’t have to invest substantial time and money in dividing assets, meaning it could sell the division easily.

After the asset migration there was no damage to the remaining assets, and all permissions were moved on time.

Our client is one of the UK’s fastest-growing finance companies, providing credit to millions of customers. Thhis company specialises in two areas:

1. providing credit to customers who are new to credit or wish to rebuild their credit history
2. extending its credit capability to global retailers in the form of white-labelled store cards

Prior to this project, the company relied on a legacy third-party platform to serve its online banking customers. The high cost of maintaining this third-party platform, along with its lack of flexibility and weak security, made it unsustainable.

Furthermore, the legacy banking platform’s unintuitive interface meant the company’s customer service team had to deal with frequent calls. It was clear that the legacy portal was having a negative impact on customer satisfaction and customer service efficiency.

Based on our reputation as portal experts, the company engaged us to deliver additional features and migrate the user base. This core portal was split into over 19 customer-facing portals for the company’s different credit brands. Each portal had to have its own e-account management features.

Influential Software assisted by building the portal identity provider and a single sign-on (SSO) solution for all the client’s portals. Our seamless migration of 9 million users was the largest single software roll-out in the client’s history. Achieving this customer data migration without a hitch, we provided a seamless transition to the new online banking app.

Our client is a global consultancy that helps businesses manage their energy consumption and environmental footprint.

At the time of this project, a large part of the consultancy’s business relied on an energy consumption dashboard application. The consultancy’s customers used this application to report on and manage their corporate energy consumption.

However, the application had been built many years before in Classic ASP, an outdated Microsoft programming language. The consultancy had identified this legacy code as a problem going forward — causing higher development costs and reduced software flexibility.

Based on our track record of .NET development, the consultancy chose Influential to modernise its energy consumption dashboard.

The central nature of this application to the client’s business caused us to take a phased approach to development. In this way we could minimise risk and ensure the perfect functionality without disrupting the business.

By updating its industrial energy management software, the consultancy improved customer satisfaction and cemented its place as a market leader.

The new .NET platform gave the company the flexibility it needed to add functionality whenever required. In turn, this guaranteed the long-term value of this business-critical application.

Thanks to the success of this project, the consultancy has chosen us as its long-term development partner. We continue to provide technical support and new functionality whenever they’re needed. 

Our client provides humanitarian aid by plane to over 55 countries in America, Africa, and Asia. This work means the organisation has to keep track of hundreds of aircraft, pilots, and support staff, along with supplies.

Their previous intranet system was causing the charity to pay fines due to out-of-date pilots’ licenses that weren’t being flagged. Reliance on manually checking details was time-consuming and costing the charity money that could have been spent elsewhere.

Access anywhere was also a priority — if pilots were stationed in countries with low connectivity, then they still needed to be able to access the intranet.  It was clear to our clients that upgrading the intranet would play a pivotal role in overcoming these issues.

Our proposal was to create a brand new intranet in the cloud. Doing this would help eliminate the compliance failures and save the charity money in the long run. 

We created automated notifications for licences that were due to expire. Our SharePoint intranet developers ensured the charity could easily manage the situation and stop being fined. We also introduced a permissions system that made sure only those with the proper authority could access sensitive information.

The primary benefit of this intranet solution was allowing staff to access company information no matter where they were based. Another benefit was the intranet’s function as a staff directory. Employees could view the organisational structure with ease and stay up to date on staff deployment.

Our client specialises in clinical training for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers. Having served dozens of NHS trusts and universities, our client is highly respected in its field. However, it was clear that the company’s back-office software was hindering further growth. Our client’s existing training management software had three interfaces:

• a cloud-based MySQL database, managed by the company’s IT administrator
• an iOS app, used by trainers to record attendance and attendee signatures
• an on-premises ASP.NET Web App, for back-office staff to input course data

The company approached us to upgrade their training administration software. This consisted of rebuilding the iOS app and the API that it used to communicate with the company’s back-end systems.

We then provided ongoing support to fix bugs in the company’s legacy code, and add new functionality as needed. These customisations included UX improvements and new fields for business users. A more significant upgrade that we delivered was a feature that enabled customers to book multiple dates at once.

This solution combined a number of improvements, from the app upgrade to bug fixes and feature enhancements. Our app and API upgrades ensured that the company was protected against attacks on its sensitive data.

Our client is a statutory board representing over 70 percent of the UK agriculture sector. At the time of this project, the agricultural board was using a SharePoint 2010 intranet, hosted on-premises. But with SharePoint 2010 end of life looming, the board saw it was time for a SharePoint migration.

Around half of the board’s 400 staff used the SharePoint 2010 system. The intranet’s main functions were central document management and project management. Overall, the intranet contained around 160GB of content in 11 site collections. This content included custom SharePoint Content Types and SharePoint Web Parts.

Rather than stay on-premises, the board decided to migrate SharePoint 2010 to Office 365, in the cloud. But without in-house knowledge, the board needed a team of SharePoint experts to make the migration a success.

The complexity of the board’s intranet content required a phased approach. In the first phase, we carried out a full intranet inventory and audit.

In the second phase we cleaned up the content to be migrated and prepared the new Office 365 intranet.

In the final phase, our engineers built a cloud-based SharePoint system with the agricultural board’s fonts, logo, and colour scheme.

The key benefit of this SharePoint on-premise to Office 365 migration was the freedom from further upgrades. Based in the cloud, SharePoint Online is entirely maintained and updated by Microsoft. This supported the agricultural board’s goals of cutting IT costs and providing better value for its stakeholders.