Category Archives: Software

News, Software

Alcumus Recognised as a Leader in Independent Review of Global EHS Software Vendors

Alcumus, a leading provider of technology-led risk management solutions, has been recognised by independent research and advisory firm Verdantix as a Leader in its 2021 EHS Software Green Quadrant for its market-leading capabilities in chemicals management​, quality management and contractor safety management​. This achievement is based on 22 vendors evaluated in the report and improves on its previous placement as a Challenger in the 2019 benchmark.

The Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant is globally renowned for its expert insights of the most prominent EHS software vendors in the market. Based on a proprietary methodology, the independent review focuses on live product demonstrations, vendor responses to a 383-point questionnaire and findings from a global survey of 301 EHS decision-makers across 25 industries and 31 countries.

Dedicated to helping over 40,000 customers take care of their people, customers and the environment, Alcumus is one of only a few vendors to score strongly across the full solution spectrum laid out in the research.

Since its first inclusion in the 2019 report, Alcumus has grown its business and customer portfolio, launching a range of market-leading product offerings and making strategic acquisitions in core geographic markets. In August 2019, Alcumus acquired Toronto-based SaaS cloud EHS software provider eCompliance and in 2020, continued its expansion in the UK and North America with two new acquisitions, Banyard Solutions and ContractorCheck.

The acquisitions further add to the proven portfolio of risk management products, which includes SafeContractor, Info Exchange and Sypol, providing an even more tailored service offering and expertise to match client needs.

Alcumus’s integrated software platform enables effective management of operational risk through digitisation of processes often siloed, such as health and safety, environmental, supply chain management, and workplace access.

Helen Jones, Chief Operating Officer Enterprise at Alcumus said: “We’re delighted to be recognised as a Leader in the 2021 Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant. This report sets the tone and describes the changing dynamics for a sector that Alcumus will lead through our focus on innovation and integration.

This is further validation of our vision to create better workplaces, keep people safe, reduce risks and simplify processes.”

Case Studies and Partnerships, Security, Software

City Security Services Selects SmartTask To Enhance Customer Service And Support Growth Strategy

City Security Services has adopted workforce management software SmartTask to support its ambitious growth plans within the UK. The bespoke security solutions specialist will use SmartTask to better manage and safeguard its team of 650 officers that handle a wide range of static, mobile, reception and firewatch services at over 100 sites across London and the home counties.

“Our aim is to create a successful guarding business through acquisitions and organic growth, so it is essential that we have the tools in place to support this process,” explains Roberto Baldacci, Director at City Security Services. “SmartTask will become an important part of our IT infrastructure, providing a highly-scalable workforce management solution that ensures we continue to deliver consistent and quality security services across our expanding nationwide footprint.”

The lead company in the group recognised the need to upgrade its workforce management capabilities to reflect its aspirations moving forward. Its previous systems had lacked the flexibility and functionality to continue providing client-focused security services as the business grows. As a result, the company undertook a detailed review of the marketplace and opted for SmartTask based on the software’s ease-of-use, proven success in the security sector, and development roadmap.

SmartTask will be used throughout City Security Services’ operation, helping to streamline and automate employee scheduling, proof of attendance and live monitoring processes. Most of security team will have a SmartTask-enabled smartphone – allowing them to receive rosters, book on and off shifts, and make check calls – with the remainder using a dedicated IVR number to confirm status. Electronic forms will also improve incident reporting, enabling security officers to capture critical information and photo evidence through the app, which can then be quickly shared internally and with the customer.

City Security Services’ central control room will have a real-time overview of the status and welfare of all security officers, so it can have full visibility of performance and respond quickly to any issues. In addition, operations and HR managers will all have controlled access to relevant reports and operational data, while payroll will be able to take advantage of accurate timesheets and holiday accrual information to save time and avoid errors. The company has already enhanced its profitability reporting using SmartTask, making it possible to effectively review financial performance by client or individual site.

With growing demand for operational data from customers, City Security Services will be using SmartTask to differentiate its offering and win more business. A number of customer sites are already using checkpoint tags, which can be scanned with a smartphone by security officers on patrol to capture time and attendance details. Meanwhile, the company is working towards launching an online portal for clients to access real-time and historical information for their individual security service.

“We are always seeking to use advanced security technologies that benefit both our customers and the business. This helps us to provide a personal, proactive and adaptable service in the most efficient manner possible. SmartTask has everything we are looking for in a workforce management solution – backed by a great team, committed to ongoing development – so we are confident the software will enable us to improve transparency and continue to drive standards within the industry,” concludes Roberto.

News, Security, Software

Gough & Kelly expands use of SmartTask to enhamce security offering

Gough & Kelly, a leading provider of security products and services across the north of England, has expanded the use of SmartTask to enhance its patrol monitoring and performance reporting capabilities at a second office in Yorkshire. The company has rolled out the workforce management software to its operation in Leeds, having already achieved significant operational improvements at its York business.

“SmartTask has proved to be an invaluable tool across our manned guard, keyholding and alarm response services, especially on our contract with City of York Council, so our aim is to replicate this success at our Leeds operation,” explains Richard Cuff, Senior Operations Manager at Gough & Kelly. “When the roll-out is complete, we will be using the software for a team of 150 static and mobile security officers working across 100s of private and public sector locations. This will enable us to further streamline administrative processes, while enhancing the customer experience.”

Initially, Gough & Kelly adopted SmartTask following a request from a customer, a boarding school in Yorkshire, for a patrol management system that would provide peace of mind that security activity was taking place. The company previously used a system that was not cloud-based and required the use of heavy and cumbersome data collectors, so they took the decision to explore alternative app-based options. SmartTask was selected because of the simplicity of the software and the breadth of information it provides.

The use of the software has since been expanded to cover the entire York operation, providing an essential tool to its main contract with City of York Council. In 2018, Gough & Kelly secured a 10-year extension for the provision of security services covering almost 100 Council sites, made up of a diverse range of locations including offices, commercial buildings, libraries, hostels, museums, recycling centres and vacant properties. SmartTask was an important part of the retender process due to its responsive, evidence-based and KPI reporting functionality.

Using a SmartTask-enabled smartphone, static security officers scan a tag at the start and end of each patrol to capture the length and time, while an electronic incident report can be submitted with additional details of identified damage and photo evidence. Meanwhile, mobile supervisors, responsible for alarm response and keyholding services, scan a tag to confirm proof of attendance. This creates a GPS location and timestamp, so Gough & Kelly can monitor response times and ensure they are meeting customer KPIs.

Typically, Gough & Kelly is measured on completion of tasks, attendance and response times, so SmartTask generates weekly and monthly reports that are tailored to individual customer requirements. Incident reports are also supplied by 10am the next-day, having previously been issued next-day by close of business, representing an improvement of up to eight hours. In addition, the centralised reporting system via SmartTask enables the company to compare performance levels at different sites, identifying operational trends and areas of improvement.

“SmartTask has certainly made our lives easier because of all the key information that is available within a single software platform. Not only does it give us added visibility and control centrally, but also simplifies operational processes for our remote workforce, removing previous paper-based systems. It has also allowed us to enhance our staff welfare checks, providing an added layer of protection and an effective way of addressing issues,” concludes Cuff.

Paul Ridden, CEO of SmartTask commented: “We have developed a highly advanced, configurable and easy-to-use guard management, monitoring and reporting solution that puts our customers in complete control. The software can be tailored to meet individual requirements and achieve a host of efficiency, performance and compliance benefits, generating proven value and creating a point of differentiation.”

Accounts and Accountancy, News, Software

Sage and Revolut partner to hand back three weeks of admin time to small business owners

Sage, a market leader in cloud business management solutions, has collaborated with Revolut to add another seamless account integration to its new, award-winning* Sage Accounting software for small businesses.

On average small businesses have spent 15 working days this year rekeying payments, reconciling their business accounts and correcting errors.  Sage and Revolut Business customers can now automatically reconcile their transactions to match their accounts in seconds, so that they can focus on the work that matters most.

With this automation, business owners no longer have to trawl through boxes of receipts, sift through statements or ‘guesstimate’ cash flow positions.  Simple, secure integration with their Revolut Business account means that small businesses can dramatically speed up their bookkeeping to put them in control of their business.

“Never have businesses needed time relief more.  Nobody started a business to reconcile their books every month,” says Neal Watkins, EVP Small Business Segment, Sage. “Small businesses will no longer need to process receipts and bank statements manually.  In 2020 the average business has spent three working weeks on such tasks.  That’s unacceptable when there is cloud technology that automates repetitive manual tasks so that the nation’s small business can spend time on surviving, growing and thriving. Hence why this collaboration with Revolut is so important; we look forward to supporting our joint customers and helping them operate more seamlessly.”

David Dinwiddie, Product Associate, Revolut Business said: “We believe in openness, transparency and innovation in the business financial space, which this collaboration is built on. We are delighted to work with Sage in this way, allowing our joint customers to seamlessly and safely pass transaction data into Sage, helping them operate more efficiently and effectively.”

“Sage Accounting and Revolut work together perfectly. I save 10 hours of manual time every week as Accounting automatically imports and sorts my transactions. This allows us to focus on growing our small business and spending valuable time with our community and speaking to our customers,” Roisin Culligan, Brew Box Coffee Ltd and Sage customer.

AI, HRTech, News, Software

skeeled launches predictive AI talent acquisition software to transform UK recruitment

skeeled, a fast-growing Luxembourg technology start up, is today launching its innovative, AI-based predictive talent acquisition software in the UK to make it easier, faster and more efficient for employers and recruiters to attract, select and hire the right talent.

The biggest advantage of skeeled’s software is the fact it automates the early and time-consuming and resource intensive steps of the recruitment process: the publishing of offers, the screening of CVs, the scheduling of first phone interviews and face-to-face interviews, saving recruiters and employers significant time and money. The platform’s predictive AI technology accurately screens candidate profiles and ranks and evaluates applicants against an employer’s job specification, selecting only candidates that meet and match the requirements.

Candidates can also use the system to upload their CVs and post short videos and undertake pre-employment tests that assess their personality, skills, motivation and attitude, which gives employers more information and an in-depth and holistic view of each applicant.

The system includes an Applicant Tracking System which enables interviewers, recruiters and employers to collaborate and communicate throughout the hiring process and follow up effectively with applicants to ensure a good candidate experience.

Established in 2014 in Luxembourg, skeeled has achieved fast growth and success. In 2019, the company achieved over 120% growth of turnover compared with the previous year.

In June, the company launched Version 3 of its software and it has ambitious growth plans which includes establishing a foothold in the UK market and doubling its workforce in Luxembourg and Porto from 25 to 50.

Nicolas Speeckaert, skeeled’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner says, “Recruiting and acquiring talent is a fundamental process for companies and we see major growth potential in the UK. UK companies are seeking innovative recruitment solutions that save them time and money – particularly in the sourcing and selection of candidates and this demand has increased since the onset of Covid-19.”

“Companies emerging from this crisis want to be more agile, to reduce costs, streamline their processes and view technology as a key enabler. Many firms have been using video to interview and onboard new starters and found it convenient and cost effective, so we are looking forward to introducing them to the benefits of skeeled.”

Speeckaert’s views are supported by new a research report, The Future of Work Survey from Cielo, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider, amongst international business leaders which highlighted that two thirds of businesses have successfully interviewed and onboarded new starters during the Covid-19 outbreak and that 82% of hiring managers will continue to interview by video once the pandemic is over[i].

skeeled has also recently partnered with VONQ, a European smart recruitment technology provider, to allow users of skeeled to set up job advertising campaigns using VONQ’s huge network  – which incorporates 2,000 global channels – by combining the publication of job offers and purchasing marketing campaigns in the press.

The company has also joined forces with the international Indeed group and has integrated Indeed’s technology in the platform to automate the publication of job offers.

Case Studies and Partnerships, News, Software

British Steel partners with MHR to modernise entire payroll within five weeks

British Steel, the leading steel manufacturer with facilities across the UK and Europe, has successfully implemented MHR’s cutting-edge iTrent payroll solution within five weeks, replacing the previous legacy system and ensuring 3,500 employees were paid in line with the requirements of the company’s acquisition by Jingye Group.

The core elements of the MHR solution became fully operational in March, enabling all British Steel employees to be paid and the final signing of the landmark deal to proceed.

“We were very impressed with the speed and professionalism of MHR, enabling us to hit a critical deadline,” said Derek Scott, HR Director at British Steel. “This brought peace-of-mind to thousands of our employees and ensured a deal critical to the future of our company went ahead. Now we have a payroll system that is fit for the future.”

The initial implementation phase of the iTrent payroll system was achieved after British Steel signed a contract with MHR on February 20.. The next phase of this partnership will see the ongoing deployment of MHR’s iTrent HR solution, helping to transform communication and engagement in the newly-acquired company. Enhanced levels of security are now also being implemented, with further functionality set to be added to the platform as required.

Anton Roe, Chief Executive Officer at MHR, said: “When speed was critical, we responded. We’re proud to have implemented a streamlined payroll system that will meet all British Steel’s future needs. Speed of deployment and rapid access to expertise are what we offer all our clients along with an unyielding commitment to high standards.”

MHR’s comprehensive payroll solution ensures an organisation’s payroll team is fully equipped to excel in today’s digital world. The payroll solution makes life easier by:

• providing employees with access to their pay data anytime and anywhere through mobile devices
• delivering fuss-free management of workforce assessment and auto-enrolment
• creating flexible user-defined workflows that deal effortlessly with authorisations and notifications
• enabling hassle-free management of multiple-role employees on different pay scales and shift patterns
• running all payroll processes automatically overnight, freeing payroll professionals to focus on more value-generating activities.

News, Software

New First-of-its-Kind “Event Portal” Enables Collaborative Creation, Sharing and Management of Events and Event-Driven Applications

Solace, the leading enabler of real-time event-driven data streaming for enterprise computing, IoT and mobile applications, today announced its highly anticipated new product called PubSub+ Event Portal that makes it easier for enterprises to efficiently visualize, model, govern and share events across their organization. The first event portal in the market, PubSub+ Event Portal is an addition to the company’s PubSub+ Platform, which includes a market-leading advanced event broker called PubSub+ Event Broker.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) promises better customer experiences, more efficient operations, and greater agility. But many enterprises are finding it hard to realize those benefits due to a lack of tools for developer productivity and governance. As Gartner notes:

“While most organizations have basic event processing infrastructure – such as notification services, message buses, and event brokers – many don’t have the high-level productivity tooling that helps developers design, develop, test, and manage event-centric applications. Nor do they have tools for governing, publishing and managing event-based interfaces. The market for these tools is sparse.”

PubSub+ Event Portal fills that gap by adding design, governance, and runtime management capabilities to PubSub+ Platform so architects and developers can work to design, create, discover, share, catalog, visualize, secure, and manage events.

“From what we’ve seen of the PubSub+ Event Portal, we believe this new product will speed up our transition to event-driven microservices as we modernize our architecture with low/no code solutions,” said David Glenn, principal software engineer, Afni, Inc.

In addition to letting users model and discover events being streamed by the company’s own event broker, PubSub+ lets them import and visualize events from other models, schema registries, and event brokers. That means Operations and Application teams can use PubSub+ Event Portal to manage all of their organization’s events, including those being distributed by other event brokers and being produced or consumed in diverse cloud and on-premises environments.

“We strive to help radiation oncology clinicians focus on their patients. An event-driven architecture will allow us to integrate systems in a much more dynamic way that otherwise takes up the clinician’s attention and time. But we hadn’t found a tool in the market that allowed us to model our next generation architecture and communicate clearly about it internally,” said Stuart J. Swerdloff, fellow, Elekta. “That’s why we’re excited that Solace is bringing to market PubSub+ Event Portal. We are convinced it will reduce the time it takes to design the next generation of integrated treatment delivery architecture. The Event Portal allows us to focus where it matters.“

“We’ve been using the early access of PubSub+ Event Portal. It changes the game for the lifecycle of event-driven architectures. It provides us with an intuitive toolset to model events in customer domains, including applications, events and schemas,” said Nikolai Blackie, co-founder and principal architect, Adaptiv Integration. “Initial feedback from our clients is that Event Portal makes it easier for architects to understand event flows in complex architectures.”

Capabilities and Functionality

PubSub+ Event Portal lets you:

Define and model event-driven systems by organizing your systems into application domains, creating and/or importing payload schema definitions, creating events, and designing each application’s pub/sub interface.

Rapidly develop consistent event-driven applications by exporting AsyncAPI 2.0.0 specifications and using code generators to generate skeleton code.

Manage and audit changes to events, schemas, and applications by rolling back to previous revisions, undoing accidental deletions, and keeping a record of all changes made.

Visually examine relationships between events and applications as they flow within or across application domains or organizations so that you can understand and optimize the choreography of events and microservices.

Browse and share events using a searchable catalog, and create new applications by leveraging events from other teams.

Integrate with 3rd-party systems to execute programmatic interactions like bulk importing EDA models, integrating with CI/CD pipelines, and creating custom reports.

“The value of streaming information between applications and microservices via the publish/subscribe distribution of events is well known, but many enterprises struggle with making events reusable and governable across their organization and partner ecosystem,” said Shawn McAllister, Solace CTO. “PubSub+ Event Portal helps by letting them design event-driven applications, events, and schemas in one tool. Those designs are automatically formed into network diagrams that teams can collaborate on as part of design reviews. When they’re deployed to production, it’s easy to see if everything is working as intended, and all changes are tracked and version controlled.”

Learn more with the Event Portal 2-minute trailer and Aaron Lee’s topic discovery video.  Check out https://solace.com/

Law, News, Software, Technology

Libryo offers business leaders free COVID-19 regulatory guidance

Libryo, the cloud-based legal compliance software company, is offering business leaders worldwide with free access to its COVID-19 regulatory tracking platform. Until 30 September, users can sign up to receive real-time updates and full access to all relevant Coronavirus regulation across 16 countries and 8 USA states. Since March, Libryo’s automated technology has tracked and notified users of over 400 COVID-19 related laws to know and comply with.

Alongside reviewing up-to-date legal information in both full source and highlight formats, users can store their related legal documents, share updates with co-workers via the in-built messaging platform and clearly detail which regulations they’ve studied and understood. This functionality keeps companies abreast of the rapidly changing regulatory landscape and helps support multi-jurisdictional compliance to COVID-19 legal obligations.

Malcolm Gray, CFO and co-founder of Libryo, commented: “Just four months following the first reported case of COVID-19, we’ve already seen hundreds of new regulations relating to the virus and associated hygiene management passed worldwide. With the volume and complexity of the regulatory landscape only set to increase, we wanted to offer business leaders a helping hand – to keep them informed about their new legal obligations and assist with achieving company-wide compliance.

“Our platform has been designed to tackle the frequency, complexity and lack of searchability of legal records. We want to make it easier for organisations to stay updated with changes and understand constantly changing COVID-19 laws relevant to them – helping avoid the consequences of non-compliance. Libryo’s technology can help you and your businesses during this uncertain time.

“Libryo is a cloud-based, digital solution that effectively tracks, filters and configures your businesses applicable regulations. We are aiming to provide you with greater certainty and peace of mind in this fast changing and often complex space. If you think we can be of help and would like to experience the Libryo platform, simply fill out a short form and enjoy free platform access until 30 September – we are excited to support you!”

Founded in 2016, Libryo currently helps over 130 organisations and more than 10,000 users with their legal compliance by filtering all laws and delivering only the regulations that are relevant to that business. For more information about Libryo, or to set up access to its COVID-19 regulatory tracking platform, visit libryo.com.