overview

Who:

Our client are providers of critical insight into companies’ employee’s behaviours, confidence and capability.

Project:

Provide technical leadership and rebuild their platform.

the challenge

Our client provides critical insight into an organisation’s employee behaviours, confidence, and capability; by employing advanced assessment methodologies to test a person’s understanding rather than memory.

The demand for new features, improved stability and scalability from the clients and market trends meant the existing platform was becoming increasingly expensive to operate. A long-term solution was required.

business driver

Our client was experiencing a decline in new business and losing existing clients to competitors. While their existing platform was ground-breaking 10 years ago it had become outdated.

Architecturally it was become difficult to manage and the UX / UI was old-fashioned and unappealing to the modern user. The company’s immediate priority was to stabilise the current platform and retain existing clients while beginning to design and develop the next generation platform. With the goal to build a solid foundation to ensure positive customer engagement.

the solution

Applicita worked closely with our client’s management and their in-house technical team to define an 18-month plan of work, which was scheduled into four discrete phases.

In Phase one, Applicita embarked upon a detailed drilldown of the current platform – identifying what were the immediate problems and how we might implement some quick fixes to stabilise the platform and eliminate some of the burning issues. Once the existing platform was stabilised, we began a process of discovery.  We needed to understand what our client, and their customers considered the high value features in the existing platform, which would be fully transitioned, and where Applicita could add value with new and improved features and functionality.  

Applicita business analysts and cloud architects worked with our client to document the features and deliverables and design the new infrastructure to support the NextGen platform. Subsequent phases focused on the delivery of the NextGen Platform. Teams were separated into functional groups, which allowed the engineering teams to focus on a single targeted area of the product, allowing for the Project Managers to control risk and complexity during the delivery phase.

Our client now have a reliable high-quality multi-tenant platform developed with design patterns that will ensure its longevity. It is simple to maintain, cost effective and allows for new features and functionality to be developed and released quickly so our client can react to the changing needs of the business and their customers. The business has considerably improved customer interaction, customers enjoy using the new platform – it’s significantly more intuitive and behaves as a modern application should.

Our client have a newly found confidence in their business proposition, they have seen an uptick in new business enquiries and existing customers have extended their contracts. Additionally, the team at our client report increased satisfaction in the workplace and take a real pride in providing a premium solution to customers.

results

1. Increase in customer satisfaction
2. Increase in employee engagement and pride in their product
3. Much faster release times for new features & functionality.
4. A modern well-designed platform that meets customer expectations.
5. Significant reduction in support requests/issues.

During Phase One of the project, the Applicita team employed the use of Visual Studio Debugging Tools to discover issues with the existing platform.

Our client’s NextGen platform was founded on the Ossatura platform, Applicita’s Application Framework. This framework provides the high value foundations needed by most business applications.

The Ossatura platform saves around 480 hours of development time and provides the following features:

• Cloud optimised scale and resiliency
• Multi-Language, Multi-Currency Support
• Authentication and Authorisation with fine-grained permissions
• User and Group Management
• Multi-Channel Notification Service
• Scheduling Service
• Customisable Styling
• Offline Support for Mobile Applications
• Fully Unit and UI Automated Tested
• Comprehensive Documentation

technologies

SignalR, DotNet Core, Angular, Azure Cloud Services, Docker and Kubernetes

Design Patterns:

Multi-Tenancy, Microservices, Command Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS) , Domain Driven Design (DDD), Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Containerisation, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment

Ossatura was deployed to allow Applicita to implement a multi-tenant SaaS platform which provided the User Interface via Web Browser, API’s for integration and Business Logic and Reporting. A microservices containerized application the platform is hosted in MS Azure Cloud Services.

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