Tag Archives: Case Studies

Industry News, Technology

Ajax Amsterdam enhances online experience for football fans with Mitek

Mitek (NASDAQ: MITK, www.miteksystems.com) has today announced that Ajax Amsterdam, one of Europe’s premier football clubs, will be using Mitek’s Mobile Verify® with Face Comparison solution to improve online experience and bolster security for fans.

Putting fan enjoyment and safety at the heart of everything they do, Ajax is committed to verifying the identities of ticket buyers. The hurdles, complying with GDPR while maintaining paper copies of fans’ ID documents, was becoming an unachievable task.

The club recognised the need to optimise its online process, ensure compliance, and greatly improve the online experience of its fans. Realising the role that identity verification technology could play in a digital process, Ajax selected Mitek’s Mobile Verify® solution.

Mobile Verify® combines a best-in-class image capture experience with leading document authentication technology to validate that the ID document presented in a digital transaction is genuine and unaltered. Once the ID document has been validated, Mobile Verify uses sophisticated face comparison algorithms to automatically compare the portrait extracted from the ID document with a selfie – thus proving that the person submitting the ID document is its rightful owner. Digital identity verification also hugely improves customer experience. Ajax has been able to digitise the customer journey and thereby make stadium entrance on match days, among other processes, easier and quicker. It will also help protect customer’s ID documents in light of GDPR. Naturally, this technology helps Mitek’s clients to remain compliant with privacy legislation.

“Our fans are the lifeblood of the Club. To improve our fans’ online experience and security in ticket sales, we knew the next stage was to deploy identity verification technology,” said Susan Lenderink CFO at Ajax Amsterdam.

“We know that our online process will be improved through digital ID verification, transforming our fans’ experience and keeping them on-side even outside the 90 minutes of play.”

Rene Hendrikse, EMEA MD at Mitek, added:

“Football fans nowadays want the best online experience, and Ajax’s investment in the latest technology is making this a reality.”

“We are proud to work alongside Ajax, a club so in tune with its fans, to help improve their online experience. With an identity verification process where AI is doing the heavy lifting, Ajax’s fans can get a consumer-friendly online experience. With an industry-leading focus on fan experience, we look forward to continuing our work with this innovative and historic club.”

Technology

ABBYY technology selected to drive finance digitisation at Costain

ABBYY, a global leader in Digital IQ for the enterprise, has been selected by Costain, the smart infrastructure solutions company, as the chosen technology partner for its finance digitisation strategy.

As part of Costain’s focus on digital technology solutions, the company has transformed its procure to pay operation, contributing to cost savings at a major infrastructure project in London. Upskilling its finance team, the group successfully implemented an end-to-end solution that can fetch an invoice, capture, identify and extract the essential data within it. It then hands over to the robotic process automation (RPA) bot to post the invoice into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Using a combination of ABBYY FlexiCapture technology and RPA developed with UiPath partner Agile, the faster process is driving efficiency – with 80% of purchase invoices no longer needing human intervention. This, combined with the addition of scanning delivery notes, has revolutionised the day-to-day work of the dedicated finance team, enabling them focus on value-add activities.

This comes as recent ABBYY research found that RPA and content-centric process automation technologies are maximising productivity and efficiency for UK businesses. Almost two-thirds (62%) of those investing in content-centric process automation have seen improved efficiency, while of businesses using RPA, over half have seen improved efficiency (55%), greater market share and increased revenue (52%). 82% have also seen a return on their investment within a year, demonstrating the ability to quickly realise business benefits. But with less than half of businesses surveyed currently investing in these technologies, many are still lagging behind, while those making the most of automation are already reaping the rewards – for employees and the wider business.

“Collaborative work with ABBYY is part of our continued commitment to invest in technology to transform our finance function. We will continue to seek to use the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to make our business as efficient and competitive as possible,”

said Tony Bickerstaff, CFO at Costain.

“Costain’s finance transformation is a model for the industry and we’re proud to be playing a key role in this as its chosen technology partner,” said Paul Goodenough, Head of Enterprise, ABBYY UK.

“Costain’s mission to challenge the norms and spearhead innovation chimes perfectly with our own business goals, and we look forward to supporting this drive for savings and efficiencies in 2019 and beyond. The greatest success will be enabling Costain to achieve its ambitious digital transformation goals.”

Technology

Rackspace aids British Heart Foundation’s mission to beat heartbreak by 2030

Rackspace, the technology services company, has helped the British Heart Foundation migrate to Microsoft Azure and transform the role technology plays within the organisation.

The move to Microsoft Azure accelerates the charity’s goal to create a world free from the fear of heart and circulatory diseases by 2030 with infrastructure that provides a foundation for growth and supports increased fundraising efforts. The website has become increasingly important for driving this mission by housing fundraising campaigns, the online retail business and acting as a source of information for all stakeholders.

Working with Rackspace, the migration to Microsoft Azure, has given the charity a scalable platform that is reliable and has an uptime of 99.9% to capture digital donations from across the globe.

Rackspace Professional Services worked collaboratively with the charity, from designing the solution through to technical implementation. The migration took six months without a minute of downtime. One of The British Heart Foundation website’s recent campaign’s drove a significant traffic spike without encountering any of the issues the website faced in the past.

Mary O’Callaghan, Director of Technology Engagement at the British Heart Foundation said:

“As our IT set up moves from being a service provider to a core part of how we achieve our organisational objectives, both the wider business and the IT team itself has had to adopt a different mindset.”

“A true partnership has been formed with the Rackspace Professional Services team who have supported us at every step of the process with unbiased expertise, deep platform knowledge, and a strong understanding of our operating environment.”

Adam Evans, Director of Professional Services, EMEA at Rackspace said:

“It was crucial for us to work collaboratively with the British Heart Foundation to bridge the gap between its existing platform and an infrastructure ready to support its 2030 goal. Our Professional Services team got to know the business inside out before designing and delivering the infrastructure, automation and migration which was crucial to meeting the charity’s business objectives”.

Lee James, CTO, EMEA at Rackspace added:

“To achieve such an ambitious and important mission, the British Heart Foundation needed to totally transform the role technology played within the organisation. Beyond the cloud migration project, we’re proud to be helping the organisation with ongoing strategic guidance on how to use technology to improve the overall stakeholder experience, scale fundraising efforts, and ultimately, work towards its promise of beating heartbreak from heart and circulatory diseases.”

The British Heart Foundation is the largest independent funder of research into heart and circulatory diseases in the UK, which it supports through voluntary contributions, physical stores, and its online retail business. As part of its strategy to 2030, the charity wants to drive advances across the spectrum of heart and circulatory diseases, preventing these conditions from developing, as well as enabling those with existing conditions to lead better, longer lives.

Technology

Prodigy Finance works with SureCloud to consolidate and streamline risk management

International postgraduate student loan provider, Prodigy Finance, has selected IRM software solutions provider SureCloud to consolidate, streamline and automate its risk, compliance, policy and incident management processes.

After a 5-month selection process that considered various vendors and platforms, Prodigy Finance selected four SureCloud products to provide a single centralised source of information and controls and automate a wide range of functions.

The four products chosen from SureCloud’s IT risk management and cybersecurity portfolio were:

  • Risk Management – to give a streamlined, structured approach to risk management, a central view of risk across the entire organisation, and automated identification, assessment and tracking of different types of risk.
  • Policy Management – delivering a central repository of all policies, a single point for policy revisions to be managed from, and a way to track end-user attestation.
  • Compliance Management – to enable an out-of-the-box control framework for complying with relevant laws, standards, frameworks and regulations across all the jurisdictions in which Prodigy operates.
  • Incident Management – to centralise, automate and simplify the management of incidents of any type, including security, privacy, health and safety.

Speaking on the partnership, Michael Light, Risk Analyst and GRC project sponsor at Prodigy Finance, commented:

“We were using a wide range of different single-purpose platforms and processes to manage our governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes. We had everything from specialist vendor software applications to manual Excel spreadsheets.

“We needed to find a way of linking these various modules and ideas together, both to streamline internal management and costs, but also to improve our GRC posture. All of the information we needed was sitting in multiple places, with no consolidation or unification.

“We have approaching 100,000 unique data subjects, many of whom have made more than one application for finance, so there are some significant data management challenges.”
Light also stated that SureCloud has also helped Prodigy Finance to uncover new sources of management information.

“All the data is live, and the reports are extremely easy to read, so it’s incredibly accessible for our management teams,” said Michael.

“SureCloud’s tools are enabling us to access and make use of data that we simply couldn’t capitalise on before, which is very promising for our future innovation and growth.”

Technology

St Albans City & District Council implements council-wide digital platform with Arcus Global

St Albans City & District Council is implementing a new phase of a digitisation project with cloud services provider Arcus Global as part of its drive for the digital transformation of its front and back end services.

The Council signed a contract with Arcus Global using the G-Cloud 10 framework, working together, they have created a roadmap for the year ahead, which will maximise value and provide further return on investment. Over the next year, the roadmap will focus on the areas that can deliver the biggest benefit to customers, now that the foundations of the platform are in place and can quickly evolve. This includes a library of council processes and a single point of access for the customer across a range of council services.

With a previously complex IT estate consisting of over 45 legacy applications, mostly on-premise, the integration needed for customer facing self-serve and cross-council customer service was difficult, time-consuming and costly.

Caroline Croft, Digital and ICT Manager at St Albans City & District Council, comments,

“Previously, our digital ambitions were limited due to the lack of a digital platform. Within two years we have moved ourselves into a very different, and much better world; be bold and make a start. Once you have a flexible platform and a partner you can trust, this will put you in good stead to let the architecture evolve around you.”

Denis Kaminskiy, Chief Executive of Arcus Global, adds:

“We are thrilled to be working with St Albans & District Council to help them achieve their digital vision.” 

“The new platform removes siloed, disparate ways of working and lays the technological foundations for the future council, improving productivity and ultimately delivering better services to residents, visitors and businesses. The St Albans vision is a breath of fresh air. It means they join a growing group of councils that are focusing on transformation right across the organisation and not just front of house services.”

By improving its front-end, St Albans City & District Council has been able to obtain more useful data from its citizens to help improve its services. It also gives staff the ability to work more efficiently and develop a workforce with new ways of working through culture change.

A council-wide team of Digital Champions has been set up to explore further ways the platform can be applied to different business areas.

Technology

Software specialist helps Network Rail keep track of rolling stock

Skelmersdale-based CoreRFID is rolling out a system of tags and readers for Network Rail, which owns and runs Britain’s railway network.

The RFID based system automatically assists in identifying rolling stock as it passes over monitoring sites across the rail network. The tags, which can be read over long distances whilst the rolling stock is moving, are coded to Network Rail’s precise specifications and this enables assets to be matched to corresponding records in Network Rail’s asset management systems.

The solution also helps Network Rail distinguish between its own assets and a those of other operators’ rolling stock using the same rail infrastructure. The readers and tags are able to fully function in all weather conditions and cope with vibration and contamination caused by dirt and grease.

CoreRFID and Network Rail will continue working together as new rolling stock comes into operation.

The contract follows a recent project with Serco for the Caledonian Sleeper rail service it operates between London and a number of Scottish cities. CoreRFID supplied 100,000 RFID access cards for the passenger cabins, which improves the customer experience and security.

Network Rail operates and develops Britain’s railway infrastructure, covering 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and aqueducts and thousands of signals, level crossings and stations, including the UK’s largest 20 stations.

CoreRFID’s director Richard Harrison comments:

‘Our work with Network Rail shows the versatility and robustness of RFID technology in the most challenging circumstances.

‘It also demonstrates our ability to undertake asset management projects on a large scale and to design and deliver a reliable solution tailored to client’s specific needs.’

Technology

Metropolitan Thames Valley selects NGDATA to optimise systems integration and improve operational efficiency

NGDATA has been working with Metropolitan Thames Valley to optimise systems integration and improve operational efficiency.

Metropolitan Thames Valley has been building homes and communities since 1966 and is responsible for managing approximately 57,000 homes across London, the South East, East Midlands and East of England. It is the company recently created through the partnership of Thames Valley Housing Association and Metropolitan Housing Trust in October 2018.

Prior to the partnership, the two organisations were seeking consultancy on how to manage the increase in data and bring together the data from business systems of the former organisations. The coming together of the two legacy organisations more than doubled the number of business systems used, to a total of over 300. In addition, the chosen approach would need to support the future growth of the company, as well as facilitate strategic systems changes, such as implementing new CRM software and changes to financial systems.

The company sought a partner who could ensure Metropolitan Thames Valley’s internal processes for data integration were consistent and controlled, delivering a quick time to value by reducing employee time spent manually moving data around on spreadsheets or implementing system integrations. The project would also need to help the company maximise its developer throughput.

Metropolitan Thames Valley chose NGDATA based on the strength of their initial project proposal and holistic view to the adoption of technology. This focus was not only which new software to implement, but how to leverage the capabilities of the existing Metropolitan Thames Valley team. NGDATA began the consultancy phase of the project in July 2018 and a pilot of the proposed solution ran in autumn of the same year.

A key challenge identified in the consulting process was that previously each developer would apply their own individual method and coding language choice to each integration. A shift towards a more consistent approach has enabled the development team to quickly and easily understand integrations when optimisation or updating is required. Implementing standard integration approaches also removes the need for developers to build integrations ‘from scratch’ each time and allows them to understand the underlying build of each integration across the business systems. NGDATA is currently providing ongoing integration support to Metropolitan Thames Valley.

Douglas Silverstone, Head of Data at Metropolitan Thames Valley, said

“One of our developers has reported being able to complete 70 integration jobs in half a day, whereas before this project our staff would require half a day for each integration. Other business teams have found that they are able to focus their time on key tasks rather than data-related admin, such as cross-referencing information and gathering reports from multiple systems. With this new strategic integration approach, we are well positioned to focus on our new business model following the partnership, and account for possible future systems expansion.”

Taj Nota, VP Professional Services UK at NGDATA added

“The housing market is beginning to wake up to the fact that data in the wrong place or not accessible, is essentially useless. Without the right data strategy in place, companies can find themselves drowning in multiple mismatched data sets or inability apply or measure accurate KPIs. The success of this project is further proof of NGDATA’s success in the housing sector, and we’re pleased to be helping Metropolitan Thames Valley improve its operational efficiency and plan for their next phase of growth.”

The next steps of the project will be for NGDATA to help Metropolitan Thames Valley to normalise the new integration process across the business and help reduce the duplicate systems brought on by the partnership. The eventual goal is for Metropolitan Thames Valley to bring integration in-house with their own development team, leveraging NGDATA team members to provide additional capacity where needed.

Technology

Harrison Steel Castings Company Turns to Scale Computing for High-Power IT Infrastructure at the Edge

Scale Computing, a market-leader in edge computing, virtualisation and hyperconverged solutions, today announced that Harrison Steel Castings Company, a leader in providing high value cast solutions to diverse markets, has implemented Scale Computing HC3 to power its IT infrastructure with high performance, simplicity and reliability at the edge.

For over 100 years, Harrison Steel Castings Company in Attica, Indiana has been a producer of highly engineered carbon and low/medium alloy steel castings. As a preferred supplier to many of the world’s most prestigious names in agriculture, energy and oil/gas industries, Harrison Steel Castings Company was in need of a modern business solution capable of keeping pace with the advances in technology, while still remaining reliable and simple to manage, with the ability to scale in the future.

Before migrating to Scale Computing, Harrison Steel Castings Company was running clusters on Windows, often causing the hosts to run out of memory or have memory leaks, and as a result, were unreliable. Moreover, it was difficult to scale and grow the IT infrastructure to match the speed at which our business was growing, until they found Scale Computing. Harrison Steel Castings Company turned to Scale Computing’s HC3 platform for server, storage, virtualisation, disaster recovery and edge computing in a single solution.

“When you look at other hyperconverged setups, you can quickly see cost is a huge benefit with Scale Computing. Take the overall cost, plus the time it takes to implement, and you have a winning combination. Our customers rely on us to supply high-quality engineered products, so maximum uptime and reliability are vital to our business,” said Shane Rogers, IT director at Harrison Steel Castings Company. “Previously, our IT infrastructure was frequently running out of memory, failing to function properly and requiring frequent maintenance. With HC3, the system is so simple to operate, it runs on its own. It greatly improves reliability, reduces complexity, and gives us the ability to grow our IT infrastructure.”

With Scale Computing HC3, edge computing, virtualisation, servers, storage and backup/disaster recovery have been brought into a single, easy-to-use platform. All of the components are built in, including the hypervisor, without the need for any third-party components or licensing. The all-in-one Scale Computing HC3 was far less complex than other solutions, greatly simplifying the management and maintenance of its infrastructure. Scale Computing HC3 includes rapid deployment, automated management capabilities, and a single-pane-of-management, helping to streamline and simplify daily tasks, saving time and money.

“Uptime and high availability in IT infrastructure are important for any organisation, and are critical for an organisation like Harrison Steel Castings Company to maintain the supply of state-of-the-art engineering and manufacturing products for its customers,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “With Scale Computing HC3, organisations can have the peace of mind of their IT infrastructure running reliably, while still being easy to operate, low-cost and highly reliable.”

For more information on Scale Computing HC3, visit https://www.scalecomputing.com/products/product-overview/

Technology

Robert Walters implement live Business Intelligence onto Global office screens

Robert Walters are one of the world’s leading specialist recruitment consultancy and outsourcing providers. They currently employ 4,300 staff operating across 31 countries.

As a rapidly growing global business, Robert Walters set about with an agenda to better improve employee engagement by making real time data visible and target driven. Digital screens located throughout the global offices were identified as a primary outlet to achieve this and as such the IT team at Robert Walters were immediately tasked with finding a way to securely display live business intelligence reports onto their 200+ screens.

Being an enterprise-level user of Microsoft Power BI, the ability to collate data from hundreds of data sources and then visualise them into business critical data reports and live dashboards, was not a concern for Robert Walters. The issue lay with being able to present these reports securely onto a screen without making them publicly available across the web.

Up stepped NowSignage, with the only solution on the market that enables Microsoft Power BI users to display their private reports onto screens through their digital signage network. By activating the Microsoft Power BI within the NowSignage in-platform app store, users can connect their Microsoft Power BI account directly to the NowSignage platform through a ‘first of its kind’ integration. Once connected the NowSignage user can select their private reports and broadcast them as stunningly animated visualisations which tell their data stories with real-time content on any targeted office screen.

Sean Paul Bradley, Continuous Improvement Director, Robert Walters, said:

“Digital signage was the perfect tool to broadcast our live metrics and targets to our employees across the globe. NowSignage were the only offering we found that could provide a secure solution to PowerBI on digital signage, and we’re delighted with the result.”

Until now, many digital signage providers have claimed to have integrations with Microsoft Power BI, however this has always been limited to displaying only publicly available links. When it comes to displaying private business intelligence or confidential financial data, it is incomprehensible for companies to knowingly generate these private reports as a public links.

Nick Johnson, CEO, NowSignage, stated:

“Here at NowSignage we are dedicated to driving forward groundbreaking technology and making it accessible to all. After months of working alongside Microsoft to achieve this integration we are delighted to announce the release of Power BI into the platform. Customers can now login to NowSignage, activate Power BI through our in-platform App Store and immediately start displaying their private reports across screens in global office locations. NowSignage is the only platform to do this securely without any visible public access”.

Industry News, Technology

Brighton’s Wagner Hall revolutionised with networking upgrade from Curve IT

Brighton-based Curve IT has implemented a superfast WiFi network across Wagner Hall to coincide with their relaunch as a multi-purpose use venue in Brighton.

Wagner’s relaunch follows the appointment of a new not-for-profit management company KPS Spaces who aim to position the building as a key focal point for Brighton’s business and creative sectors. The venue was first built in the 1970s and is owned by the adjacent St Paul’s church on West Street.

Curve IT’s network now mean that superfast connectivity is implemented across the venue. This will benefit businesses using the space as well as visitors and the general public, with the connection now being more than suitable to support mobile and WiFi card payments, streaming and hotspot needs.

For Wagner’s new management team, the need for seamless connectivity was of the utmost importance. Penny Parker, Venue Manager at KPS Spaces said:

“We knew that in order to make Wagner Hall an attractive and integral venue for Brighton, a strong internet connection was needed. We looked at regular commercial broadband offerings, but were troubled at the thought of us having connectivity issues, and it taking several days to fix, as that could affect business massively.”

“For us, Curve IT was the natural choice, they’re a locally based business, and we know that if we have any issues they’ll be sorted on the same day! We’re really looking forward to growing Wagner Hall into a core event space for Brighton, and Curve IT are just the right networking partners to help with that!”

Curve IT have connected Wagner Hall by establishing a converged network from a wireless link on the roof of Brighton Centre (another Curve IT network). This method means that Curve IT own the network and are not reliant on third parties for support and fixes. Curve IT have provided networking and connectivity solutions for a wide variety of structures in Brighton, London and across the UK. Including the British Airways i360 Observation Tower and a series of Essential Living’s new build apartment buildings across Greater London.

Simon O’Hare, Managing Director of Curve IT added:

“It’s great to see somewhere like Wagner Hall be given a new lease of life as a multi-purpose venue for Brighton. We are pleased that the team there acknowledge the importance of strong connectivity, and we look forward to working with them closely in the future, which I’m sure will be bright for Wagner.”