Canal & River Trust

The Client

The Canal & River Trust is among the UK’s biggest charities set up to care for England and Wales’ 200-year-old waterways, with responsibility for 2,000 miles of canals, rivers, docks and reservoirs, along with museums, archives and the country’s third largest collection of protected historic buildings.

The Brief

The Trust issues licences to the vessels which navigate its waterways. These licences may be purchased for various types and size of boat, different durations and for use on all or a subset of the Trust’s waterways.  A number of purchase methods were already available, for example by post or over the telephone, but customers could not purchase licences online. The Trust recognised that the offline processes are not the most efficient use of Trust employees’ time and skills and do not meet the expectations of customers.

The Trust needed a web based licensing system so that;

• Customers could register and link up with their boat details and purchase the correct licence for their boat online
• Customers could easily renew their licences online
• Renewals and Renewal Reminders could be sent out on a schedule to customers
• Customer Services could quickly and easily identify customers and all their associated data so they could more easily complete licences and answer customer queries over the phone
• Pricing data could be managed online
• All correspondence templates could be managed online
• All licence data could be sent overnight to their SAP system

The Solution

We developed the Web Licensing system using an Agile Development model. Using this approach we were in constant contact with the Trust, previewing versions of the software every two weeks which they could test and use themselves, making sure we were developing the right thing for them at every stage. This allowed us to adapt and change the development plan as the Trusts priorities and requirements changed during development. The resulting solution was consequently delivered on time, meet the Trust’s budget and fulfilled their requirements exactly.

Outcome

The successful implementation of the web licensing system that works on all devices delivered a range of benefits to both the customers and the customer services team. Customers are now able to buy and renew licences quickly and easily online using a very simple website. They can download their latest licences when they need them and update their details when they change. In addition the customer services team are more able to help and guide customers through the process of buying licences and are able to complete postal applications using the same ‘Impersonation’ tools provided by the back end admin system.

In the first year over 20,000 boaters have used the site and have purchased over 33,000 licences.

Waterside Moorings

The Client

Waterside Moorings has been set-up by the Canal & River Trust to market and sell the 3,600 moorings that they manage across their network

The Brief

Waterside Moorings had an existing site that was difficult to navigate, users could not easily find the moorings they wanted and there was limited functionality with which to sell and market their moorings. As a result of this they were not getting as much income as they could because of under occupancy at a large number of their mooring sites. They wanted a new website that would solve the website problems, increase the occupancy levels and maximise revenue from all their sites.

The Solution

We worked closely with several different members of the Moorings team, including the Mooring Managers who would be main users of the back end admin system, to develop a site that solved all the problems inherent in the old site. We improved the auction process so that users could easily bid on and view the progress of moorings sold by auction. We added modules to the backend so that Mooring Managers could easily update all the data related to the sites and moorings they managed so that they could market them much more effectively and give users the most up to date information. We integrated with Google Maps to create a geographical search so that users could find the moorings they wanted with a simple one box search.

Outcome

Waterside Moorings saw an increase in sales of 50% over the 6 months after launch compared to the same period for the previous year. This was a huge success for the Moorings team – the key reason for creating the site was to increase sales and this was achieved immediately. We are continuing to work with Waterside Moorings to develop the site further and to offer even more functionality for boaters.

Faber & Faber

The Client

Founded in 1929, Faber & Faber is the most iconic independent arts and literary publisher in the world.

The Brief

Faber & Faber receive thousands of permission request each year from authors and other organisations seeking to licence their copyrights. There was typically a wait of between 4 and 6 weeks before a licence request was processed. The licensing team at Faber had identified a number of key requirements for the permissions system;

• Automated creation and sending of personalised licences based on user input and licence templates
• Ability to draft and change licences before they are sent to users
• Automated pricing structure based on number of parameters including territory of use, author, title, request type and number of words/lines or pages requested for use.
• Different rights on a per title and territory of use basis
• Automatic redirection of users to alternative rights holder where Faber & Faber did not hold rights
• Taking payment for licences online
• Responsive design that works on all devices

The Solution

The pricing and rights structure required for this project presented a unique challenge for Concurrent. There was no equivalent system in the marketplace which performed the level of automation required to streamline the permissions process. We worked closely with Faber & Faber to ensure that the all the possible different types of licence requests were managed correctly and that all licence requests were given the correct price for their territory of use. The most difficult challenge was hiding the complexity of the pricing model from the user and making sure the process for them was seamless. Using the Agile Development methodology Faber were able to test and use the solution over several iterations to make sure we got it all right.

Outcome

The main reason for introducing the online licensing system was to reduce wait time for users applying for licences. This has been dramatically reduced from between between 4 and 6 weeks to around nothing for 90% of licence requests as they can now be purchased online instantly. This has massively reduced the workload on the licensing team at Faber and Faber as the process of creating and agreeing a licence and fee has been automated and streamlined by the online tools. Faber and Faber have also seen an increase in licence requests as users are more inclined to use this system to request licences.

The end product is a first of its kind in the industry and subsequently we are continuing to partner with Faber & Faber to offer a white-labelled version of the licensing application.

Officrèche

The Client

Officrèche is a combined nursery and office-space company based in Brighton. They provide a flexible solution to child care for working parents.

The Brief

We were approached by Officrèche to build an online booking and management system. The key requirements of the system were

• Database of members, children and staff
• Ability to book crèche and office space
• Ability to take payment for subscriptions and bookings
• Ability to earn time by childcare work
• Ability to ‘check in’ for both bookings and childcare
• Well defined rules controlling booking availability and ensuring legal / safety compliance
• Ability for managers to manage staff shifts/timetables

Beyond the basic requirements to ensure children, staff or space could not be double booked or booked when the location was closed it was essential that the system was compliant with government childcare regulation. This included such things as adequate space in each room for each child; sufficient staff for the number of children; maximum length of nursery stay. In addition there were a number of supporting requirements, for example: a simple user interface; report generation; workflow subscription payments.

The Solution

Based on the sophisticated requirements, particularly the staff to children ratios and space rules, we recommended the development of a system using our core technology stack of ASP.NET MVC C# and SQL Server. To ensure the maximum amount of resources could be focused on developing the project specific pieces of functionality, we leveraged various frameworks including NHibernate and jQuery to reduce the amount of boiler-plate development required.

Being a self-funded start-up business, the client was understandably keen to reduce any risks associated with the project, to start using key functions as early as possible and to drive down costs wherever possible. We discussed with the client the idea of following Agile practices for their project, particularly with regard to iterative and incremental development. Primarily, this would mean frequent releases of the system and early and continuous feedback. This would reduce risk of delay or overspend by ensuring the client was always fully aware of the current state of development; key features could be delivered for use in production very early on the project; and would help to highlight functionality of limited or negligible business importance thus reducing costs. By implementing this methodology we successfully delivered on all these aims as well as on time and to budget.

Outcome

The system is now central to the Officrèche operation, and they have often reported that the business would not exist without the software.  The system has automated a number of menial and complicated tasks and users are able to complete all booking and payment tasks online which has allowed the staff to concentrate on providing an Ofsted rated outstanding service which has been key to the success of the business.

The user experience of the admin section has been modified since the initial solution was delivered. The Agile approach to development allowed us to quickly deliver small changes based on feedback from staff at Officrèche with minimal risk. There were several iterations of change, both in terms of layout and functionality, which significantly improved the user experience. Junior staff that were initially reluctant to use the admin system are now happy to use it to support day to day tasks freeing up senior staff to concentrate on growing the business as a whole.

The website and booking system has been highly commended in the Nursery World awards Website of the Year category for the last two years.

Enfilade

The Client

Enfilade is a fuel management systems supplier. They were established to create a system to manage the supply of fuel to the Royal Mail by Harvest Energy and GB Oils.

The Brief

The Royal Mail has its own fuel supply contained in over 400 tanks across 350 sites in the UK.  Before the delivery of this project the Royal Mail has no overall visibility of what fuel was contained in these tanks and as a result of this there were a number of identified problems. Orders for new fuel were often only generated when tanks became empty meaning some sites ran out of fuel, deliveries were often made to tanks that were already full and it was also suspected that fuel was being stolen from some sites but there was no way to verify this.

The Solution

The Royal Mail has its own fuel supply contained in over 400 tanks across 350 sites in the UK.  Before the delivery of this project the Royal Mail has no overall visibility of what fuel was contained in these tanks and as a result of this there were a number of identified problems. Orders for new fuel were often only generated when tanks became empty meaning some sites ran out of fuel, deliveries were often made to tanks that were already full and it was also suspected that fuel was being stolen from some sites but there was no way to verify this.

Outcome

The Royal Mail now has a far greater visibility of one of its biggest assets and has been able to streamline its fuel management and save a significant amount of money. For example within one week of the project going live fuel thefts were identified and reported on three separate sites.  The Royal Mail can also now plan ahead by stocking up particular sites ahead of any planned strike action. The system manages over 500 deliveries totalling nearly 9 million litres of fuel and automatically generates over £10 million pounds of invoices for fuel every month.

We continue to work with Enfilade developing the system to support new functional requirements. The solution has also recently been expanded to manage the fuel supply to Co-Operative forecourts across the UK.