The customer has many teams dealing with emergency repairs. Deciding which team was in the best position to handle a new and high priority repair was very difficult to know. The customer picked a piece of software that allowed jobs to be sent to and tracked using mobile devices held by the teams. The issue that needed solving was how to get the information that was stored on other systems into the software that communicated with the mobile devices.

Solution

Springboard IT provided a solution for the client that automatically downloads jobs from an FTP. A Web service was then created, that receives jobs and uploads them to SharePoint, where they are displayed in a Gantt View. Once a job is added to SharePoint, a calculation is done on the type of job, and assigns the job a Gang Type.

Every time a job is added to SharePoint, an Event Receiver is waiting and then sends the jobs to vWorkApp. Once jobs are on vWorkApp, they can then be allocated to an employee, dependant on the calculated Gang Type. These jobs can quickly be scheduled on vWorkApp by simply dragging and dropping jobs onto an employee’s timeline. This is then sent directly to the employees IPad Mini. Where the employee can easily see where its next job is, and all of its location information.

Additional Benefits

As well as just handling the communication OUT to the mobile devices, information FROM the mobile devices was fed back to the originating systems. This ensured that the latest status was known by the central system and that completion triggered invoicing without further action.

The customer spends large amounts of time trying to plan routes for teams undertaking emergency repairs.  Plans change often as high priority or emergency jobs come in. This makes it a thankless task for those doing the planning.

Making this process automatic not only saves the time of the people involved in the planning but also can potentially do a better job of selecting efficient routes than the human eye.

This was part of a larger project that includes sending the scheduled jobs to another system that communicated with the repair teams.

Solution

Springboard IT made use of an API provided from Postcode Anywhere to take a list of jobs, holding information about their location, priority and duration to calculate the most efficient route to take. The sophistication of the software takes into account the weight and widths of a vehicle to ensure that obstacle filled routes are ignored. The recommend routes returned automatically show the most optimal route to take potentially saving miles of travel and huge reductions in cost in the long run.

The information return was presented to the user on SharePoint to give a visual representation of the results. Along with this information, documentation of the planned route was sent to the end user, as well as an optional TomTom file should they wish to integrate with their satellite navigation on the road.

Additional Benefits

The information returned gave great scope and allowed us to use it along with Google Maps to drop pins onto a map of the journey giving users the ability to see their itinerary for the day, or the period of optimisation.

Sometimes high priority jobs would come in half way through the day so simply re-running the application would update the route to include more important jobs to fit with deadlines.

30th April 2012

Cloud Computing is becoming a massive part of the evolution of technology. We believe that a mix of cloud solutions and solutions installed in-house can provide the optimum balance of reliability, performance and security. Apple have recently included it in their latest IOS, Microsoft are offering cloud solutions Office 365 and Azure. This allows companies to worry less about the technology that is being used and more about the running of the business.

At Springboard IT we have come across a piece of great cloud software at an unbeatable price. Live Drive is a backup program that simply sits on a server or pc and copies files from locations that the user defines and then stores them in the cloud. It means you do not have to worry about anything not being backed up. Within a user defined time of adding a new file or changing an existing one, it will have been copied and transferred to the Cloud location. You may now be thinking, ‘But what happens when I want to get access to the backed up files?’, Live Drive has a web application which allows you to login securely and access every file that has ever been backed up, then with a simple click of a button you can download the file and have access to it. You may worry about running out of space on your allocation of cloud, but with Live Drive you actually get masses of room, the standard version comes with 1Tb of space, which most of you will agree should keep you going for a while, but if you are one of these people who like to have literally everything backed up then you are able to upgrade this space at small extra costs.

You’re probably thinking, ‘What about the cost?’ this is the best bit about Live Drive; the cost is only £10 a month per user. For any busy company, it think it is fair to say that £10 a month is worth it for the amount of time it takes to make sure everything you want to be backed up is and the not having to worry that the document you now can’t find has to be written all over again.

So all in all, this facility made possible by the Cloud is a great thing in our eyes, it helps improve technology to run more efficiently, as well as helping businesses to spend less time worrying about their technology and more time to do what they do best.

We enjoy developing applications using Cloud Services, so if you are in need of any Cloud customised software then please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

27th April 2012

After coming across Windows Communication Foundation (WFC) at Springboard IT, we decided it would be worth our while looking in to it a bit more. The first thing we found is that the documentation on it is endless, MSDN have every aspect of it covered for whatever solution you may need it for.

The idea behind it is that it allows the programmer to build server-orientated applications. This opens up the door for many different scenarios, whether  it be a chat service that allows two people to communicate or exchange data in real time or perhaps even a service that supplies current data to others, such as a traffic report or other monitoring services. Overall WCF gets massive thumbs up from us and we will endeavour to use it to its full ability in our up and coming projects.

24th April 2012

So today was the day that here at Springboard IT we completed our first SharePoint Seminar. It was a great success, so thank you to all who came and took the time to listen.

The main aim of the seminar was to educate potential SharePoint users and show them what SharePoint’s true potential’s are, as we feel that Microsoft do not give it all its worth for smaller organisations. Today’s Seminar showed a small insite in to the basic out of the box functionallity that SharePoint can give you and probably one of the biggest points that a lot of people do not realise is that with Windows Server it is free.

For those of you that attended and even those that may not have, if you have any further questions on SharePoint then please dont hestitate getting in contact.

So keep an eye on Springboard IT for any up and coming events we may be hosting for you to get involved with.

2nd April 2012

Soundex uses phonetics for indexing names by sound. The main use is for searching through data when spelling mistakes may occur, this means similar sounding words will be given the same representation meaning they are returned despite minor difference in spelling.

We have recently developed a way of implementing Soundex in to one of our Sharepoint Clients solutions. In this specific case it was used to search a large list of names where small mistakes or differences in spelling caused search results not to show. By using Soundex Springboard IT has now provided a more comprehensive approach to this problem and now searches return results that are more accurate.

30th March 2012

Our new website is now up and running for all to see.

BIG Thank You to Cognique for all their hard work.

Watch this space for updates on Springboard IT’s latest ventures and news.

23rd March 2012

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