Business Operational System

Background

Traffic jams and inefficiency

Highways are the backbone of Britain’s transport network, and their management and optimisation is therefore critical. AppDrawn client Renteq provides traffic management business systems to a wide range of customers working on roads and highways. However, the company’s legacy system was limiting the service it could provide to its customers, and causing some serious traffic jams for users. Booking customer jobs using the legacy business system was complex and convoluted. Furthermore, the Microsoft Access database could only be accessed on PCs in Renteq’s office, making it difficult for employees to work remotely.

Renteq needed an all-in-one solution that allowed users to book customer jobs, reallocate resources, and manage fleets of vehicles. An environmentally aware company, Renteq wanted to cut down on the paperwork associated with its legacy business system. The new business system needed to incorporate a staff shift log and HR functionality and enable financial reporting, including raising invoices and reports on expenditure and income.

Renteq had four key goals: to streamline business operations, become more eco-friendly, increase mobility, and eliminate errors. It knew what it needed to do, it just didn’t know how – or who to partner with – to achieve its goals.

Solution

The road to success

Based in Watford, Renteq is located a stone’s throw away from AppDrawn’s HQ, and is a company we’ve worked alongside for many years. Our proximity was great in terms of meeting the team, understanding the challenges they faced and formulating solutions and a new business system.

Exploring the legacy business system allowed us to pinpoint the difficulties Renteq team members faced when using it day to day, as well as the features and tools that were lacking. Unsurprisingly, one of the first issues that were raised by users regarded the system’s poor usability, which was causing delays and inefficiencies. As such, a new, bespoke, whole-business web application was needed. Leveraging Ruby-on-Rails and ReactJS, we designed and built a robust, balanced and comprehensive server and client-side solution.

The application was built using a hybrid agile/waterfall approach, meaning new interfaces were designed and reviewed, and then built to a fixed timescale. Sean Pannell, Managing Director at Renteq, explained: “At each stage of the development, we were kept involved and this allowed us to add our ideas into the overall software package.”

This included ideas on UX. The display of the new business system was completely reinvented, dividing the general platform display into individual screens to show unique information, easing navigation for the user. We also designed warnings displayed in real-time and eliminated different commonly-experienced problem scenarios.

The new mobile-ready business system can be accessed anywhere on any device, freeing up team members to work however, and wherever, they wish. The new booking system is a “very powerful tool”, commented Pannell, and in addition to having “streamlined the current processes within my business”, it also allows Renteq to manage other areas of the business, such as HR and financial reporting.

Outcome

Navigating the future

The new, streamlined, bespoke business system has saved Renteq’s business a significant amount of time and money – and spared its users a significant amount of frustration! “The system works in half the time and has brought instantaneous productivity in comparison to week-long processes,” said Pannell.

Now, roughly three hours in every month are saved, when looking at processing downtime or software failure. Renteq’s employees are spending less time re-entering data, waiting for pages to load, and trying to navigate messy graphics. Instead, their time is spent productively – boosting Renteq’s business, improving the service it was offering to its customers, and helping to keep vehicles and passengers traversing the length and breadth of Britain!