Sinclair International succeeds with Lifecycle
Much of the fruit that you buy from a supermarket is labelled by one of Sinclair International’s fruit labelling machines and TABLIFT or PEEL&REVEAL labels. Sinclair, with its head office in Fresno California, has a truly global operation to serve a worldwide client base of fruit growers.
The company’s global IT operation is based in its UK head office. With applications ever more critical to business success and technology ever more complicated, Adam Pryke, Information Systems Manager at Sinclair felt that it was important to select the right development partner for the its latest project.
“We needed to work with a partner that understood the technology and has the skills and experience to deliver this kind of project using best practice methods for development and testing. Our previous experience suggests that working with a professional provider who builds these kinds of solutions day in and day out and understands the wider delivery issues would ultimately be the most expedient and most economical option. I wasn’t comfortable with an offshore delivery which seemed unlikely to work for us.”
The project for Sinclair’s engineering department followed the Lifecycle delivery system, which ensures regular stakeholder review through the development process and works with the client right through test, deployment and go live.
“When you have projects like this with clear business goals and short timescales it’s so easy to go off track during the development phase if you let the scope creep. Lifecycle and the P1 team kept us focused on the desired outcomes, managed change requests effectively and made sure that we delivered a high-quality solution as fast as possible.”
Sinclair's solution is completely browser based and was built on a Microsoft .NET and SQL Server 2008 platform using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Team System.
The project was delivered in a mentored style which involved Sinclair’s developers in key stages of
technical design and hands on coding.
This mentored style delivery helped Sinclair’s own developers to better understand the solution’s architecture, learn new skills and be in a much better position to support and maintain the software from go live.
"We actually sent two of our developers on a .Net training course prior to starting the project with P1. It was great for the guys to get stuck into a real project where they were able to impart their business knowledge at the same time as understanding how the things they had learnt were applied into our software."
Lifecycle ensures that the project goes live as fast as possible and works with the client right through deployment, the go live day and to a point where an ongoing support agreement is established or the software is successfully handed over to the client's own team.
"I think when you're using an Agile method that it's important to get something live fast otherwise you risk getting into an ever increasing loop of change. This is a philosophy both parties shared. It's much better to incrementally add new releases to the software to deal with non-essential change requests."
Find out more about Sinclair International.
Watch our video to meet some of the team and find out more about Norfolkshoring.
Go Ape grows with Capital
A multi-award winning business that runs high wire adventure courses all over the UK, Go Ape is a real success story. With a head office operation, contact-centre operation, 17 courses and a number of frequently mobile employees it was very challenging to connect people, applications and information.
Adam Castleton, IT Manager, explains the problem. “The very distributed nature of our business combined with the relatively remote forest locations at which many of our people are based makes for a significant IT problem."
"The only way people could easily share information and documents was by using email and even that was becoming difficult due to bandwidth limits.”
Go Ape’s courses stretch from Haldon Forest Park in Devon to Aberfoyle in Stirlingshire, Scotland. The majority of Go Ape’s workforce is based at the courses with executives and several marketing and administrative staff based at the company’s head office. People travel regularly around the courses and often work from laptops in hotel lobbies and cafés.
“In the end we opted to base our core server infrastructure and IP phone switch in a data centre. This immediately made our business more location independent and solved the bandwidth issues.
To help improve responsiveness and provide extra protection we also put a server in our head office, which provides another domain controller and runs a distributed file system over to the data centre.”
Go Ape now runs a predominantly Microsoft based technology stack which includes Windows Server 2003, ISA Server 2006, Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Terminal Services.
"The final piece of the puzzle was making sure everything kept working smoothly and that people could get help and support when they needed it.”
Our NetGuard service provides the proactive administrative and maintenance services required to ensure Go Ape’s IT keeps running at peak performance and a service desk for end user support seven days a week.
“On a busy summer Saturday when you have a queue of people waiting to get onto the course you need to know that the IT is going to work or that, if you have problems, responsive support is at hand. We’d been a NetGuard client for a year already so had no hesitation in extending the agreement for another two years once the new IT infrastructure was implemented.”
Find out more about Go Ape!
