Computing Awards - Projects of the Year (2)

Voluntary Sector Project of the Year

People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals

The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) is the UK’s leading veterinary charity, every year providing more than 1.2 million free treatments to sick and injured pets of people in need, through 42 PetAid hospitals and 181 shops.

The charity wanted to improve communications and make central IT resources more available to staff, so installed a secure broadband network provided by supplier Star. All hospitals and regional offices had broadband and new PC equipment installed in just two working months.

The new network has cut costs and allowed more use of secure home working for staff. Retail sites can now input sales figures directly into the central database, and IT support teams can provide remote diagnostics without requiring visits to site.

The network has allowed a number of key applications to feed into PDSA’s customer relationship management system, providing a single view of the charity’s supporters, and helping the marketing team improve campaigning.

Future plans for the charity include bringing hosting of the PDSA web site back in-house and development of an organisation-wide intranet.

GAP Activity Projects

GAP Activity Projects (Gap) is an educational charity that provides overseas volunteering placements for 17- to 25-year-olds. Each year, Gap places 2,000 volunteers in projects in 31 countries. Gap worked with the University of Reading on a project to web-enable its processes, as part of a Department of Trade and Industry-sponsored programme.

A number of innovative systems were developed using modern programming tools such as XML, C# and SQL Server, including online applications and payments, management information, and interactive features to support a web community of volunteers. As a result of the project, more than 80 per cent of applications are now completed online, freeing up staff time for other work.

Gap has launched an electronic magazine to communicate with more schools, and overall marketing costs have been cut through the higher-profile web presence.

The new systems will support greater internationalisation of the charity’s work, aid fundraising and help create new services for Gap students.

Comic Relief

Comic Relief set up a web site to support its Red Nose Day fundraising activity, to process online donations as well as provide information to visitors on the charity’s work. On Red Nose Day itself, the site processed more than 240,000 transactions worth more than £8m.

The site was built with help from sponsors Cisco, Energis, Macromedia, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, SkyNet Systems and Akamai, using innovative grid technology to support 14 web servers, with 500Mbit/s of available bandwidth.

The use of collaboration tools with broadband and virtual private network technology allowed a UK-wide team of 20 consultants to manage the site, while reducing travel and accommodation costs by 60 per cent.

After a successful Red Nose Day, the team behind the infrastructure was given less than two months to prepare for supporting the global Live 8 concerts in the summer. The systems were re-engineered to take more than nine million petition entries online, with some 300 million hits during the concerts. Traffic peaked at 905Mbit/s, serving 5.3TB of data – the equivalent of four, five-week long Red Nose Day campaigns.

Teach First

Teach First is a not-for-profit organisation that recruits high-calibre graduates to undergo placements in challenging London schools, sponsored by businesses that help provide training in leadership and subsequent internship opportunities.

To manage the relationships in the scheme – involving schools, universities, government organisations and businesses – the charity introduced an online customer relationship management system from supplier Salesforce.com, which is also a sponsor of the operation.

Using the web-based software immediately saved the charity £80,000 a year, money previously spent on third-party application development and support. The system manages all Teach First’s activities, from graduate recruitment to event management, campaigning and communication with the various stakeholders and participants in the programme.

Teach First has placed 340 students in teaching posts in London, the first of whom will graduate this year to move into roles in teaching, business, government or the voluntary sector.

MapAction

MapAction is an international charity that supports humanitarian relief operations through the collection of geographical information and production of crisis mapping for aid agencies in disaster zones. The charity used web services technology to integrate geographical information systems, global positioning systems (GPS) and satellite communications to support teams in the field and at base in the UK.

Using mapping technology from supplier ESRI, MapAction teams collect, analyse, present and deliver customised reports to help the response to crises. The system was used in Sri Lanka to support relief operations after the tsunami disaster in December last year.

MapAction assisted the government by collecting information from affected districts to provide real-time mapping of the area, covering data such as population statistics and road accessibility, and the activities of the various relief organisations working in the region.

Future plans include a global data archive and distribution of electronic interactive maps in the field to humanitarian organisations.

Plan

Plan is one of the world’s largest child sponsorship charities, raising money from more than one million sponsors in 15 countries to invest in projects such as health, education, housing, water and sanitation.

The unique nature of the organisation means it is difficult to find off-the-shelf software to support its operations, so an in-house team is employed to develop applications using Microsoft’s .Net tools. But the charity found it was having problems in effectively testing and fault finding newly-developed systems before implementation.

A review by consultancy Silversands identified issues such as high levels of user support needed, problems with changes and patching, and a complicated fault finding process. As a result, Plan decided to centralise IT control across its three hubs in Europe, Asia and the US. Part of this involved creating a replica of the IT infrastructure to test new applications or upgrades before going live.

The new environment was built around VMware software to create a virtual infrastructure testing capability. The system has improved the speed and efficiency of testing, reduced the risk from changes to software, and will help deliver innovative applications that allow IT to help sponsors track the progress of their child.

Innovative Project of the Year

BNP Paribas UK

Financial services giant BNP Paribas used grid computing technology to build a more flexible IT architecture for its structured credit department.

The banking group had historically followed industry practice of building IT systems with plenty of spare capacity to cope with future growth. But realising that this would mean spending extra money on hardware and support, the company turned to vendor DataSynapse to create a grid infrastructure to increase its use of existing resources.

The first phase of the project went live in July 2004, with 100 servers connected onto a computing grid.The second phase was completed in March this year, adding a further 150 servers to create a system that now processes some 30,000 tasks every day.

‘Prior to the grid implementation, the pricing of complex derivatives could take hours,’ said Dipak Shah, head of structured credit IT at BNP Paribas UK. ‘Now it’s at the touch of a button – we can get a price in minutes.’

The grid system has also helped the bank create new revenue streams by introducing complex financial products more quickly.

Environment Agency

The Environment Agency is responsible for warning the five million people living in two million properties in flood risk areas about possible flooding from rivers and the seas. Communication to so many people in such a short time is a challenge, and the systems in place since 1996 were reaching the end of their useful life.

The agency worked with Fujitsu Services on a £9.5m project to develop Floodline Warnings Direct, to allow alerts to be issued by email, internet, text messages and mobiles, as well as fixed telephones and fax.

The system combines a web front-end, specially written middleware, spatial databases and text-to-speech conversion software to improve the work of the agency. The project has taken more than three years, with work starting in May 2002, through design phases in October 2003 to beginning development work in early 2004. It is running in parallel with business transition and preparation work up to the present day.

pH Europe

pH Europe provides bulk container transport services for a range of companies shipping products as diverse as pharmaceuticals, food, chemicals and industrial parts.

Working with systems integrator JDS Professional Services and products from supplier RF Code, the company developed a system to track trucks and containers in real-time. The project introduced a hybrid approach using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on containers and global positioning system (GPS) satellite tracking for trucks.

As a truck leaves a pH site, an automated check scans the containers in less than five seconds, and relates them to the truck for tracking purposes. This improves asset utilisation and allows better planning and scheduling.

pH is also offering an asset tracking service to allow customers to monitor their assets, and create additional revenue as a result. Further benefits have been achieved by cutting labour costs, reducing breakages and losses, and providing a better, more flexible service to customers.

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is the government education agency responsible for overseeing the GCSE and A-level exams and national tests at ages 7, 11 and 14.

In 2003, QCA launched a six-year, £29m project to build an IT system for delivering on-screen tests to 4,000 secondary schools, and to develop a new practical IT test for 14-year-olds.

This year, a national pilot covering more than 45,000 pupils was completed, proving the process from registering to completing the tests. The system is installed in some 700 schools, rising to 4,000 by 2007. The project has reduced operational costs per pupil from £7.20 for comparable paper-based tests to £4.60, and aims to implement on-screen exams in all secondary schools in England.

In future, the system may be extended to other examinations, as well as a further 30,000 colleges and primary schools. It is also attracting interest from overseas education bodies.

The QCA also manages a £37m per year business developing paper-based tests, and says that migrating this activity to the new system could save more than 30 per cent of the costs of the operation.

Cordon Pharmacy

In January this year, suppliers Aegate and BT completed a three-month pilot with six pharmaceutical firms to tag medicines at the point of dispensing using radio frequency identification (RFID) and barcodes.

More than 180,000 items were scanned by 44 pharmacies across England and Wales, using a custom-built scanner to authenticate prescriptions against a secure database. The pilot showed that tagging products in this way can help tackle counterfeit medicines, improve patient safety by reducing medication errors, and improve the service provided by pharmacies. Some 90 per cent of pharmacies in the pilot said the technology gave them more confidence that they were dispensing the correct medicine.

Aegate’s parent company, PA Consulting, is now investing £15m to bring the authentication at the point of dispensing service to market in the UK. ‘The scanner has proved a very innovative addition to the dispensing process,’ said Fliss Davies, of Cordon Pharmacy.

SE3D/HP Labs

HP Laboratories in Bristol led the formation of the SE3D Animation Showcase, an initiative to allow 12 promising film-makers to create 3D animated films using utility computing technology.

HP Labs created a service to support animation rendering – the process of converting ‘wire frame’ computer models into finished frames of film. This is a good test environment for utility computing because the process requires heavy compute requirements, but only at certain points in the film production cycle.

Smaller companies cannot afford to buy their own systems to support rendering, but offering a pay-as-you-go service makes access to such advanced technology a possibility. Animators loaded their digital input data to the rendering service, which runs on 120 HP servers in California. Rendered frames were downloaded by the animators when complete.

The project demonstrates the use of utility computing in a commercial environment – sharing and paying for limited resources, although in this case the initiative was supported by UK arts and media funding bodies. The 12 SE3D films were shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year.