Transparity Ballard Chalmers

Situation

The Royal Horticultural Society required a solution for integrating data across their multiple systems in order to achieve several high-value aspirations.

The initial focus was on the integration of the Digital Member Sign Up (DMSU) software; to create an API for the platform to use and seamlessly integrate to the current core systems. This needed to be delivered in an extensible way that could be expanded to cover other systems and in a secure, fault-tolerant and supportable way.

Solution

This Azure Integration Platform implementation addressed the requirements of the DMSU API by implementing a platform that could be used to integrate the RHS application estate.

Azure was used as it provided RHS with the ability to scale the services. The additional benefit of the implementation enabled easy integration of the remainder of the RHS application estate by way of Service Bus queues and subscriber services as well as mapping functions that enabled the creation of a Canonical Service Bus that mapped from the membership management system to the API.

The use of the Master Data Services (MDS) improved the specification of the data to a single golden source for the defined items and allowed for the future integration of data quality tools to ensure that the correct data cascades downstream to other systems, offering a single and consistent view of Customer data.

The choice of standard Azure services was made to make a careful balance between the existing skills of the RHS teams in C# and the Serverless technologies used. This helped to ensure that there is familiarity with the techniques used and re-use of existing code that can be scaled, security implemented and error handling to assist in live debugging.

After the success of the fully bespoke build of Capital Tracker, a cutting-edge cloud enterprise application developed for managing Private Equity funds, Ipes continued their longstanding relationship with software development outsource partner Ballard Chalmers on the build of The ID Register, an online investor onboarding platform that helps makes key processes such as fund launches faster, easier and more cost-effective. 

It centralises fund subscription information, conducts Due Diligence and Know Your Customer (KYC), and also provides Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Common Reporting Standard (CRS) tax reporting to the relevant jurisdiction. 

Ipes had envisioned an online platform that would enable individuals to create one complete KYC and FATCA profile and share it securely with their lawyers and fund managers, making Compliance Due Diligence (CDD) quicker, easier and more cost-effective. 

This idea for The ID Register was born in response to demands from the legal and the PE Fund community, who were frustrated with the lengthy CDD process.

The technology behind it is primarily ASP.NET MVC, C#, SQL Server, TSQL, AngularJS, Bootstrap, SSRS and is a modern responsive web application hosted on Azure. 

Since its launch in 2016, The ID Register has evolved to become a central industry utility for the Private Equity sector It makes the investor onboarding process quicker through the Universal Subscription questionnaire (USQ).

Situation

The original AppCan system was based on web sites and APIs built using .NET and SQL Server deployed on Microsoft Azure together with a Mobile app developed in Objective-C for iOS devices. 

The Mobile app had several limitations and the app needed to be redeveloped to work cross-platform with as much shared code as possible. The new app needed to use the same API as the existing iOS app used so that it could be introduced without change to the Azure API and web sites and have the same functionality as the current version of the iOS app.

Solution

The technology behind the AppCan solution is: 

.NET Web applications on Azure App Services: For customer specific web sites and the central administration web site Xamarin Forms Mobile App supporting both iOS and Android platforms

.NET Web API on Azure App Services: APIs used by mobile devices for sharing data

Azure File Service: Cloud-based file system for storing documents and images

SQL Azure: Cloud-based database holding the master data for the system C#, T-SQL, JavaScript and XQuery programming languages.

The system is designed as a serverless Azure application, so there is no need to patch or manage servers. It is designed to auto-scale out to multiple physical servers as load increases, with SQL Azure that can be scaled up and down as load dictates.

Outcome

“Full credit goes to the developers and management of our development partner, who fully understood the requirements and delivered this project with remarkable speed. They made it a completely painless process and that gave us all the confidence that AppCan XP was going to be very successful.The feedback from users has been incredible, as it is not only much faster in its use, but also brings new essential features, including Photo markups and automated filing of records into the document folders.” 
Managing Director, AppCan

Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (QVH) is one of the world’s leading specialist centres for reconstructive surgery, and expert therapy and rehabilitation services. Burns patients who had the potential to be treated at their local hospital were often sent to QVH for review. 

In such cases treatment could be delayed by several hours, and patients would be involved in unnecessary travel (particularly if QVH’s services were not suitable for the patient).

In 2012, the trust recognised that with the adoption of the latest technologies it could enhance service. Following intensive evaluations, QVH contracted Ballard Chalmers for the full design, development and implementation of the new solution – Telemedicine Referral Images Portal System (TRIPS). 

Built within a SharePoint environment using .NET custom development, using Standard SharePoint CAL licenses, TRIPS technology provides QVH with a secure (encrypted) transfer of digital images of injuries, enabling hospitals and paramedics to directly consult with clinicians at one of the five hubs on patient injuries and trauma at any time of day or night, regardless of where in the region the patient is located. 

TRIPS was an immediate success and its rollout was further accelerated by the involvement of the London and South East of England Burn Network, who recognised that this technology contributed substantially to its own objectives. 

QVH’s partnership with Ballard Chalmers has been highly successful and continues today.

Situation

Mia® would use data analytics to support innovative business process transformation in order to drive growth. It would provide transparency across legacy processes, transforming the way that C-Suite leaders can capture and interpret data. Equipped with rigorous intelligence, the platform would optimise key operational areas to turn traditional risk into opportunity with data-driven clarity.

Solution

Working together with Square Marble Technology, Ballard Chalmers delivered the bespoke SaaS Mia platform with state-of-the-art security and backup.

Some of the technology (that we can disclose) behind Mia includes:

• User interface developed in React and Redux
• Data requests made over AJAX primarily to an ASP.NET Web API application running in IIS
• LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework used extensively for server-side data requests
• Microsoft SQL Server database
• .NET for File Import and Business Process Automation applications
• Rabbit MQ used for communication between the website and file import/business process applications
• Microsoft Power BI for Business Intelligence reporting

Mia’s capabilities include:

• Risk Management
• Group Relationships
• On-Boarding
• Credit Limit Management
• Customer Trading Status Management
• Workflow Management
• Dispute Management
• Task Management
• API’s
• Self Service Imports GUI
• Self-Service Exports GUI
• The Mia State Change Engine
• Configurable Dashboards
• Repayment Plan Module
• Single Sign On
• SMS Module
• Email communications
• Credit Card
• Post Integration
• Microsoft Power BI Reporting
• Data Modelling
• Multi-Language Comms Template Pack
• Export to CSV
• Line Items
• Audit History
• Search
• Advanced Search
• Document Integration

Outcome

“SMT, together with Ballard Chalmers have broken new ground with Mia. It is truly an innovative business intelligence and process management application that transforms data into a smart business process by fully automating an optimal balance between achieving best receivables performance against best operational efficiency.” - CEO SMT
 

Ballard Chalmers’ solution is a fully bespoke .NET / SQL Server product that deals with a wholesale update of the way the Oyster card is used and the way payments are taken and distributed. 

The most obvious of these, from the customers’ point of view, is the way that contactless payments are accepted at entry and exit gates, allowing them to pay with a swipe of their own debit or credit card. This is just part of what has been achieved. 

The solution also includes:

• Revenue Apportionment Engine for the TOCs when a journey is part TfL and part Overground.
• A huge matrix and state machine-based calculation engine that covers all possible fares for all routes and calculates server-side how much the customer should be charged for each journey.
• Provision for payments from credit and debit cards. These are queued and processed asynchronously, using SQL Server Service Broker, as the banks cannot deal with the speed of contactless card swipes at gates.
• SQL Server PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) database for analysing trends in the large volumes of data involved. The data volumes are huge with millions of card swipes per day and billions of records in the databases.
• The new Oyster Online website, will provide a range of additional functionality such as enhanced sales capability; refunds directly to the customer’s card or bank account, (radically simplifying the refunds process); change ticket validity online to increase or decrease zones, and manage lost or stolen cards online.

In 2015 Dr Sean Smith, head of the Fares and Ticketing development team at TfL said, “The development of the Oyster card system, with contactless payments and other features, was a massive .NET development, involving enormous data volumes and requiring the best development team... Ballard Chalmers contributed to the success of this project by supplying critical resources including TFS build engineers, MVC C# developers, C# messaging and workflow developers and SQL Server development DBAs.”

SITUATION

Cornerstone was in the process of implementing an IT system that would manage their entire estate (circa 21,000 sites). This system (Caesium) needed to contain all details of the estate and ensure a greater level of automation could be achieved between Cornerstone, its customers and suppliers.

A requirement that came about as part of this was the need for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform to link Caesium to the various existing internal, supplier and shareholder systems.

The primary goals of the integration project were:

• Providing uniform access to relevant business data, to Cornerstone shareholders’, customers’ and suppliers’ IT systems
• Automation of business processes between Cornerstone and its customers and suppliers
• Automation of internal business processes
• Ensuring business processes are driven by high-quality data by avoiding manual information re-keying into multiple systems

SOLUTION

Our approach was to use Out of The Box BizTalk features with additional customisation.

The ESB development was based on BizTalk 2016. Standard BizTalk Adaptors were used, primarily for provisioning and calling Web Services.

The endpoints were designed to accept generic payloads and the content/messages were authorised and routed inside generic BizTalk orchestrations using authorisation and routing tables.

All message types, from all adaptors, required schemas (i.e. XSDs) and were mapped to/from internal ESB canonical schemas using mappings.

In order to support a high degree of resilience and fast response time, the system has been designed to operate on BizTalk 2016 Enterprise or Standard Editions. BizTalk Enterprise Edition supports BizTalk Groups which offer an active-active cluster of servers. This has the advantage that in the event of a single server failure another server in the cluster would take over with no loss of service.

SITUATION

Having completed the initial development of the Care Database and with the application stable, the client was looking to change partners for long-term support and enhancement development of the system. In particular:

• A fixed price support agreement with bug fixes to agreed service levels
• Ongoing maintenance to ensure the system remains secure and optimized
• Fixed-price development services to enhance The Care Database

The first stage of taking over management of the Care Database Application was:

• Transitioning the source code into GIT Repos in Azure DevOps
• Creating a backlog of issues and new features in Azure DevOps
• Carrying out a thorough review of the Web App and SQL source code
• Making some selected code changes and ensuring these could be successfully be deployed to TEST and then LIVE
• Ensuring that CHT knew how to operate the Ballard Chalmers online service desk for raising tickets

Having successfully taken over the management of the system, routine support could begin.

The next stage was to look at how to improve the way the system is supported and developed by doing the following tasks. Each of these were specified and estimated as a new piece of work:

• Change the system so that the Web App and API work on Azure App Services (instead of IIS in a Virtual Machine (VM) per client) and then migrate all of the clients over to App Services
• Introduce fully automated deployment pipelines to ensure releases from DEV to TEST to UAT and LIVE servers are fast and robust
• For new features, introduce a new form of automated UI/Integration test that operates directly against the browser, in the same way a user does. These tests are based on Specflow and Selenium and are defined in Gherkin syntax.

OUTCOME

We are now successfully managing the Care Database Application, have fixed a number of critical issues and have resolved several performance problems.

SITUATION

United living needed to migrate data from three legacy systems that contained all their construction-related drawings and documents into a single new system.

The three systems were: Buzzsaw from Autodesk, Conject from Aconex and Openspace from Deltek. The new system is Aconex.

There were standard methods by which data could be extracted from all three systems into a file for subsequent import into Aconex. The main migration challenges were:

• The three systems export data in different ways and all three are different from the import format for Aconex.
• Aconex has twenty-one fields of metadata for each item, ten of which are mandatory. Not all these fields are available from the source systems and would need to be obtained from the operations team familiar with the construction projects.

SOLUTION

During the scoping/design phase, given the large number of files and versions, it quickly became apparent that using the Aconex bulk upload tool was not a realistic option.

This was because it would require separate uploads for every version of all documents in each project. So instead, a .NET application was developed using the Aconex API to automatically migrate the data with minimal user intervention.

For each of the three systems, we produced a version of the .NET program that could migrate projects automatically. We then carried out one successful migration and the remaining migrations were run by United Living, with Ballard Chalmers providing support where needed.

OUTCOME

The integration and migration project was successful, some key results:

• Mail response time improved by 84%, while volume has grown 4X
• Transmittal response time improved by 68%
• RFI response time has improved by 19%
• Discovery has transformed from what could have taken a full-time person a year, to something that can now be done in a couple of hours to half a day

Situation 

DECC (formerly DEFRA) and the Energy Saving Trust concluded that their third-party hosted software did not allow the level of control needed to maintain the software to the most current level and that the current architecture did not truly promote a high availability model.

The aim was to move the hosted solution to a more cost-effective internally hosted model, combined with upgraded infrastructure and a more robust redundancy model, allowing true high availability. 

Solution 

Ballard Chalmers was appointed to handle the Energy Saving Trust project, based on their reputation and expertise with Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft IIS. 

Ballard Chalmers undertook consultations with the website developers at EHS Brann and the Network and Infrastructure teams at EST, to ensure that the hosting transition was detailed to meet the planned move date of January 30th 2009. 

A single instance SQL cluster was built to host the working SQL Server database, with storage being provisioned by the EST SAN solution. Two independent website servers were built, fronted by a Radware load balancer to host the working website. 

Outcome 

The solution was completed successfully and being a predominantly Oracle House, DBA Training was also provided to allow the DBA Team the ability to build, monitor and maintain the Microsoft SQL Server solution on an ongoing basis.

“Thanks for your support … We are looking at moving more applications to Microsoft technology and we view you as our Microsoft Partner of choice for future work.” - IT Project Manager at the Energy Saving Trust.

Situation

Parkinson’s UK were looking for a temporary solution to allow staff to capture their objectives for the year in one place. They needed a solution which was simple to create and even simpler for staff to use, requiring no training.

Solution

The initial assumption was that the answer would be a customised SharePoint application but when Ballard Chalmers was approached, it was suggested that Microsoft PowerApps could be a great solution. 

The ability to easily connect with a SharePoint list, embed the form on a web page or SharePoint page and potentially the ability to use a mobile app was key for Parkinson’s UK to agree to proceed. 

The PowerApps solution automatically recognises the user but also allows him/her to submit their line manager, role and cost-centre to help improve the data quality. Users are able to then add up to seven objectives, with a description and target date for each one. 

The form is very simple and easy to understand with large bold icons and typeahead for all user lookups. It demonstrates the ability of PowerApps to quickly meet requirements and deliver a simple-to-use application in a very quick time that can be supported simply and deployed in minutes.

Outcome

The PowerApp was then embedded to a SharePoint Communications Site to maximise the real estate of the screen for the application and rolled out to all staff for the start of 2018. 

From initial engagement to full delivery only required two days of consultancy from Ballard Chalmers.

“PowerApps was included with our Office 365 licenses, so when Ballard Chalmers proposed this as our solution it enabled us to have a cost-effective, easy-to-use application, delivered within very tight timescales. The product itself is very flexible, so it needed a flexible approach and good collaboration, which we certainly got from the Ballard Chalmers team.” - IT Consultant at Parkinson’s UK

Situation

From March 2014, Young Epilepsy had been utilising a SharePoint 2013 application for its Incident Reporting System (IRS). 

This replaced and upgraded an earlier non-SharePoint system. Utilising SharePoint allowed the organisation to manage the safety and wellbeing of their clients in one place, though they had identified outstanding issues inherited from the earlier system that were influencing its SharePoint IRS. 

Additionally, it needed to implement enhancements necessary to meet operational requirements and so contacted Ballard Chalmers to help.

Solution

In 2015 Ballard Chalmers completed the Phase I refinements work on Young Epilepsy’s IRS. Further to this, it was identified that other enhancements could be made to help improve the system. 

Once this was completed there was Phase II of development was undertaken which included carrying out a major refactoring of the data schema.

Phase III concluded in February 2017 and included a new Red-Amber-Green (RAG) rating system for incidents, further enhancing the ability to respond correctly and timely to those incidents of most concern. 

These changes positively impacted everyone in this unique organisation. Commissioners and key stakeholders particularly report increased visibility and control over incident management.

Outcome

Ballard Chalmers and Young Epilepsy have an ongoing relationship, which has seen the two organisations work together on several projects now, including SharePoint Intranet design consultancy, and website and software support plus maintenance.

“Ballard Chalmers provides us with specialist development, advice and support, and integrate well with our in-house Information Services Team. We find everyone at Ballard Chalmers very personable, professional and highly skilled. Their work with us has had a good balance of corporate professionalism and personal engagement. We have appreciated their sympathy to our work in the not-for-profit sector.“ - Head of IT Services, Young Epilepsy

Situation

Tokyo Electron (TEL) had initiated a formalised safety and quality management procedure for observing the work environment and practices of its employees.

For the procedure to work, the technology used for reporting issues needed to facilitate ease of use. 

The existing reporting tool was identified by TEL as being unworkable in this respect due to:

• A counter-intuitive interface.
• Searching for or filtering items was difficult.
• A complicated and time consuming information capture and submission method.
• A complex tracking submission and action status/completion.
• Weak performance summary reporting systems.

Solution

TEL brought in Ballard Chalmers to custom-build from scratch a SharePoint tool for release into their existing intranet. This new SharePoint system delivers:

• A logical interface.
• A method of capture/upload that is easy and intuitive.
• The ability for someone to submit on behalf of another person.
• A method of capture/upload which prompts people to consider all hazardous condition/behaviour categories.
• A system that can produce automatic reminders.
• A system that produces the reports required.
• A system that allows individuals to easily search for previously submitted items when online.

In enabling the above, the system also now incorporates the following elements:

• Submission/input interface
• Ability to submit remotely via mobile phone or tablet.
• Minimum capability to capture offline and upload (automatically) when online.
• Database with reference to an employee data file.
• Reporting intelligence.
• Automated reporting.
• Search functionality / interface.

Outcome

The SharePoint system delivered by Ballard Chalmers enables TEL employees and managers to now collaborate effectively on issues affecting the safety and quality of the working environment. 

With this, the procedure can now serve its intended purpose as the backbone of TEL’s health and safety programme in the workplace.

Situation

Exterion Media has recently replaced an existing legacy ERP system with Microsoft Dynamics AX, suitably customised for their business processes and installed in a managed data centre. 

Exterion also uses cloud-based Salesforce as their CRM system. A seamless and efficient means to integrate these two systems was required to speed up operations and avoid the need for double keying of data.

For example, potential new clients created in Salesforce should be passed to AX for credit checking and approval, before Salesforce should accept orders from them. AX should provide integrated product lookups and price calculations for Salesforce, while AX manages stock levels.

Solution

Having completed a number of projects together since 2014, Exterion Media contacted Ballard Chalmers for the design and development of an integration between Salesforce and Dynamics AX using Microsoft BizTalk Server. 

Dynamics AX would manage product, price, inventory and discount information. Salesforce would process clients, opportunities and quotes. BizTalk would manage all data interchanges between the two systems

The custom solution delivered by Ballard Chalmers has enabled Exterion Media to:

• Automate the process of approving new customers created in Salesforce
• Enable Salesforce to lookup products, product packs and prices in AX in real-time
• Enable AX to manage the fulfilment of orders submitted from Salesforce.

Outcome

"We've used Ballard Chalmers for integration using BizTalk in a number of applications. They are refreshingly straightforward and practical and we are very pleased with the work they have done for us" - IT Director, Exterion Media 

Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) commissioned Ballard Chalmers to develop the new “StudentNET” portal, based on our reputation as a Microsoft .NET development specialist with in-depth knowledge and vast experience in the creation of enterprise-scale cloud applications.

The design utilised the absolute latest in technology and graphical presentation to ensure acceptance by students, with a fully customisable homepage and drag-and-drop apps. 

With slick graphic design and presentation, it included a range of apps to match each student’s individual needs and preferences, together with a theme and colour selection and the type of features that students were used to in their online social life.

The portal provided a central location for students to manage all of their day-to-day financial and course needs including:

• Student internal messaging service.
• Ask real-time questions of University staff and faculties.
• Subscribe to new information services.
• Pay tuition fees and Council Tax online.
• Poll and student voting facility.
• Access to course timetables and course details.
• Webnote module for personalised views.
• Bulletin board to trade ideas and information. Update personal details.
• Flickr and other Web 2.0 type facilities. 

The functionality was created using ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX.NET, LINQ to Entity, LDAP, Active Directory, Web Services and WCF. ASP.NET 3.5 was used to create the StudentNET portal framework. AJAX.NET and the JQuery JavaScript library provided a modern drag-and-drop client-side interface. LINQ to Entity provided a data layer to SQL Server tables, and T-SQL stored procedures and functions. LDAP interfaces with Active Directory for authentication and user profile information. Web Services and WCF provide back-end interface layers.

Ballard Chalmers provided a full development team. Initially, this was as an external project based at our own offices, and, once the first system version was completed and live working as an embedded team within Ipes, but still based at our HQ and with the proactive guidance of Ballard Chalmers’ Chief Technical Officer Geoff Ballard.

The result was CapitalTracker.com, the first entirely web-based system in the field, with an app-based architecture enabling customised views of data in real-time to all users. Investors could now see live valuations, transfer information and obtain up to the second reports; clients could view the information for all their investors.

• The technology behind CapitalTracker is primarily ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server and T-SQL.
• The user interface was based on apps that are developed as ASP.NET controls with JavaScript, JQuery and AJAX.
• .NET Server-side security ensured that each user could only request certain pages and apps.
• Data requests were made over REST primarily to WCF Data Services and Entity Framework.
• LINQ to Entity Framework was used extensively for server-side data requests.
• The more advanced apps made use of Knockout.js.
• A unique and proprietary Data Widget software layer enabled power users to design their own Apps using a drag and drop forms designer and a data configuration file.

“CapitalTracker now controls every aspect of our business. That’s why the partnership with Ballard Chalmers has been so important. The programmers work for me, but are supported by their full technical team – it’s the best of both worlds. This gives us continuity at a reasonable cost and maintains the relationship with Geoff and the Ballard Chalmers team. It’s our software and we have the flexibility to add enhancements when we want, and we are well supported by Ballard Chalmers.” - Tim Andrews

Situation

Funded by charitable donations, the lifeboat crews and lifeguards of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) have saved at least 140,000 lives at sea since 1824. With 92% of its total income coming from donations and legacies, the RNLI’s public-facing website is a critical tool for generating awareness and for fundraising. 

The website is based on the SharePoint 2010 enterprise content management system and has many thousands of web pages. It also has a large number of custom extensions enabling it to provide a whole range of services to the RNLI’s audience including details on all lifeboat stations, automated weather updates, membership sign-up and donations.

The RNLI had identified a number of issues with the website including Users found the donation process too lengthy. 

So the RNLI appointed a creative agency to update the design and reached out to Ballard Chalmers for help on the back-end SharePoint development. 

In particular, it was necessary to speed up page loading times and improve the “donation journey.

A lack of compatibility between the live web servers and associated QA (Quality Assurance) web servers was making the deployment of new software and content very difficult, because the behaviour on the live servers was not always consistent with the behaviour on the QA servers. The compatibility differences were between installed Microsoft service packs and cumulative updates, server configuration settings and deployed custom code. 

Solution

In order to address both of these issues, the RNLI selected Ballard Chalmers to redevelop the donation web pages and to rebuild the live and QA SharePoint server farms in a way that ensures they are functionally identical allowing reliable software releases to take place.

Outcome

The updated website allows the RNLI to continue and further its outreach, garner donations and educate the public on safety in British and Irish waters.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service had implemented a new Secure Data Transfer (SDT) gateway to streamline the submission of money claims. As a result, Shoosmiths were required to integrate their two existing case management systems – Visualfiles & IDR – and the HMCTS SDT system.

Solution

The solution was based on BizTalk Server 2013 and the BizTalk ESB Toolkit. The ESB resides between the Line of Business (LOB) systems and the SDT system and has the capability to act in real-time or in batches with respect to both incoming and outgoing messages.

The HMCTS SDT is a real-time Web Service-based system. Shoosmiths have two internal LOB claims systems, one used by 80% of the users and one by 20%. Neither of these systems have built-in sophisticated integration capabilities therefore the methods of interchange are:

• Incoming and outgoing communication is handled by files being placed into a drop folder.
• Incoming and outgoing calls are made through staging tables in a SQL database.

Outcome

“The integration with HMCTS is critical to our business. In the short timescales available, the easy option would have been to develop a specific point solution, adding yet more complexity to our systems landscape.

"Instead, the use of BizTalk provides us with the flexibility to enhance the solution as the integration with HMCTS evolves, whilst being able to extend the use of this service to other parts of the business if required. Ballard Chalmers did an excellent job of delivering exactly what we required when we required it.

"I was impressed by how quickly they understood the legal process and were able to deliver a flexible, yet scalable solution that can keep pace as our business grows.” - Andrew Souter

Situation

In their position as the transport information hub for London, Transport for London collect and disseminate information from many different transport sources in as many different formats, from departure boards to motorway cameras, to deliver an online service for commuters through their primary website. 

TfL’s existing data transfer system, software and hardware were prone to stalling and delays and had inadequate error handling, resulting in delayed and inaccurate information being presented to the web pages. 

Ballard Chalmers was briefed to develop a new software system that would broadcast live travel data to clients and customers through the use of syndication, personalisation and localisation. 

Solution

The brief was to develop a proof-of-concept software solution using Microsoft BizTalk that harnessed raw data from over 25 sources across the capital.

These sources included the tube and rail network, station information, river, roads, buses and coaches. 

Data was captured, stored and processed as XML in a scalable BizTalk environment. The incoming feeds were used to create live HTML web pages every minute, which meant that our solution had to process every piece of information in just 30 seconds.

Continuous monitoring and status alerts of incoming and outgoing feeds were provided in a form suitable for display on TfL’s internal monitoring dashboard. This allowed rapid diagnosis of any data and system problems.

The new system generated real-time performance reports on a monthly and quarterly basis, as well as on trading partner adherence to weekly data refresh requirements. By sharing the data load across servers, the software ensured that one failed server would not hinder the reporting process. 

The scalability of the project meant that the system was future-proofed against large amounts of new data and sources, making its implementation more cost-effective in the longer term.

Ballard Chalmers is one of the UK’s foremost experts in the energy sector custom software systems development and integration. With a track record of delivering on projects for many of the sector’s major players. 

The relationship with OVO Energy extends back to 2010 and as such, Ballard Chalmers was contracted to develop their software system based on BizTalk Server 2010, ASP.NET 4.0 and SQL Server 2008 R2 and 2012.

ASP.NET web pages are used directly by call centre operatives, whilst BizTalk Server handles the business processes, long-running transactions and integration with the account management and financial systems that run the business.

The software system automates a number of functions, including: 

Direct Debit Refunds: Allows refunds to be given to individual clients where requested. The system calculates the amount of refund based on the user’s energy consumption.

Direct Debit Review: Recalculates customer direct debits based on their consumption pattern.

 Direct Debit Batch Review: Performs batch review of large numbers of accounts to ensure that direct debits are correct. 

Change of Tenancy: Manages the switching of an account between old and new tenants in rental properties, both of whom have to be contacted to complete the transaction. 

Disputed Reads: Manages the disputed read process which typically occurs when customers switch suppliers and suppliers claim different readings. 

Collection Management: Managing payments from customers that have not managed to keep up with their direct debits, through the use of pre-pay meters and other methods.

Smart Meter Installation: Automated booking system for managing the installation of Smart Meters, for use by the call centre and direct online use by customers.

Situation

The management of stock and delivery logistics are fundamental to operations and the Evo Group IT team had identified that existing systems could be improved upon by utilising the latest in cloud technology.

Solution

Evo Group enlisted Ballard Chalmers for the build and migration of two core logistics on-premises legacy applications: The Transport Management System for despatches and the Product Information Management System.

Transport Management System – Despatches

A robust system for tracking 100,000 daily messages (such as loaded, en-route, delivered etc) is achieved using Azure Logic Apps. This Logic Apps implementation enables individual staff to easily share information with each other and facilitates improved collaboration across the delivery network. Field workers, such as delivery drivers, now share real-time data with those based in offices responsible for the respective part of the process, who can monitor and coordinate actions accordingly.

Product Information Management System

This Logic Apps implementation enabled staff to access up-to-date product information, which can fluctuate based on any number of factors and drive content directly to Evo Group’s eCommerce sites. With faster access to such information, the organisation is well positioned to monitor effectively and efficiently satisfy customer requirements.

Outcome

“Our IT strategy is to move aggressively to the cloud via SaaS or PaaS where feasible. In partnering with Ballard Chalmers, we were able to deliver within project timescales what would traditionally have been on-premises Microsoft Biztalk applications as scalable Azure PaaS solutions.” - Group Head of It Development