Software Development Case Study : Housing Services Contractor

The customer, a leader in the provision of energy services to the social housing sector, had a requirement to interface their job management system with their clients’ system to automate and improve service delivery

Objectives

• Enable electronic delivery of orders and call outs, with jobs automatically created in the clients’ management system
• Automatic and timely status updates back to the client on job progress
• Relieve manual admin tasks, automating data entry and reporting

Challenges

• Requirement to interface with three different clients, each of which provided and received the data using different formats and systems
• The job management system in use did not natively integrate with any of the client systems
• Data transformation from one system to three diverse systems, whilst ensuring data integrity

Solution

Working with the customer, their clients, and the existing job management software provider we developed a middleware capable of importing new jobs to the management system and extracting real time updates on those jobs.

This data was then transformed and delivered in real time to the customer’s clients, improving KPIs, visibility and relieving the load on the admin teams.

Dedicated interfaces were designed to receive jobs from the clients, which were deployed on highly available services running in Amazon’s UK cloud. Secure links at all stages ensured data protection and integrity, with data locality ensuring data stayed in the UK.

A suit of reporting tools were also developed to provide performance and reconciliation reports, to aid monitoring of the contracts and job performance.

Benefits

Folllowing deployment of the system, the ease and speed of issuing, tracking and managing jobs was improved, enabling the business to manage new contracts with fewer staff than would otherwise be needed.

The automated aspect reduced manual errors, improved fix times and enabled the business to grow whilst offering improved services to the clients, and to bid on larger, more challenging tenders.