Mitre for Intertek
Background
Intertek is a Total Quality Assurance provider of assurance, testing, inspection and certification services to a wide range of industries, across almost every business sector.
Problem
Intertek recognised that their existing business process, ‘The Castle System’ (which was developed to manage test result data for customer projects and to generate customer specific reports) had a number of issues. These issues caused it to be inefficient, unreliable and immensely frustrating to operate. Based on their experience of working with us on other projects, Intertek chose Team Technologies to develop a solution for them including analysis of the existing system and then designing and building a suitable replacement.
Issues with the existing system
- Lacked cost/time efficiency.
- Wasn't scalable.
- No longer supportable.
- Proved to be unreliable and prone to crashes.,
- Had a number of performance issues including being very slow to load.
- Lost functionality resulting in jobs taking a long time to complete.
Goal
Intertek needed a technologically enhanced and reliable replacement system that delivers the necessary bespoke functionality, with enhancements to speed up the processes involved. It also needed to be a scalable platform that could be supported internally or by a number of vendors. Providing a solution to the issues would ultimately improve the organisation’s overall efficiency as the application could be rolled out to more departments.
What We Did
Team Technologies reviewed the existing system and developed a proposal for a replacement. This required meetings with key players at Intertek to fully understand the nature of the problem and to get an in-depth look at the existing system from the users perspective.
It was concluded that the best way to meet Intertek’s goal was to create a new application based on current tried and tested technologies (using the existing application as a form of prototype to prevent loss of functionality).
From this a 3 step development was proposed
Step 1: Create a proposal based on a detailed review of the existing system.
Step 2: Produce a proof of concept to ensure the chosen technologies effectively deliver the user performance and scalability required.
Step 3: Develop the entire Castle replacement application (Mitre).
Benefits of new Mitre system
The new Mitre system has benefitted Intertek in a number of different ways including:
- Helps to improve staff efficiency.
- Provides a reliable system which eliminates data loss, re-keying and essentially, frustration.
- Makes the system easier to support (in or out of house).
- Recovers and enhances functionality lost in the previous Castle application.
- Automates outputs from the application to reduce checking errors.
- Speeds up the processing/data entry process (adding new features).
- Simplifies the build of a new customer project.
- Has increased the speed of navigation around large projects.
