Car park ecommerce system: Business analysis, design, development and support for Devon County Council (Exeter)

Devon County Council is the largest employer in the county with over 2000 staff based at County Hall, including those working for other occupiers including the local NHS Trust.  To advance the Council's environmental objectives and set an example to other employers in the city they introduced a site specific Travel Plan for County Hall which included the introduction of chargeable staff parking, with charges related to pay grade, and limited each member of staff to parking on campus three days per week.  MSM won a tender for this very sensitive and high profile project which staff hoped would fail and the media scrutinised carefully.  We wrote the entire ecommerce platform to allow staff to pay for parking in advance, integrated to the payroll and staff identity smartcard systems of three employers using the site and the physical car park barrier control software.  The project was delivered on time and significantly under budget.  The application is written in .NET using SQL Server 2005.  The new system is proving successful at encouraging staff to use alternative transport and to car share.

Download the full case study

Health check of business critical Delphi & Oracle stock management tool leading to taking over support, maintenance and enhancements for Bio Products Laboratory (Elstree)

BPL is a Government owned business supplying plasma products sourced from the USA to the NHS.  They are subject to stringent quality standards and regulations due to the potential life or death impact of product availability and of the quality of each individual unit.  BPL processes up to 1 million individual donations of plasma annually in separate deliveries containing from 1 to 50,000 units.  Computerised tracking of each unit is essential to cope with the volume and to apply appropriate quality assurance processes. 

MSM tendered under OJEU rules to provide support of an existing database written in Borland Delphi 2005 using the Oracle 10g database.  The system is business critical and the success or otherwise of the business depends on it, and the lives of thousands of recipients potentially depend on it working.  We successfully won the tender for an initial 4 year period, against the incumbent, based on our quality processes and highly competitive commercial model.

Emergency fix of large call centre application in Delphi & Paradox leading to taking over support and maintenance for West Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service (subsequently NHS Professionals Special NHS Trust)

WYMAS operated a specialist NHS recruitment agency on behalf of the Department of Health, as well as emergency services.  They had contracted a third party to develop a call centre application to completely manage the business.  The call centre subsequently grew from 6 to 150 seats and the software couldn't cope, resulting in downtime costing £½million per week.  The third party struggled to fix the problems for three weeks and then withdrew.  We were asked to fix and had the system back up and running within 30 hours, thanks to our familiarity with the technology.  We then supported the call centre on a 24×7 contract with ½ hour response time for about two years, until it was eventually replaced as part of the wider NHS IT procurement.  Return on their initial investment with us was achieved in 37 minutes!