Radicore Customers

Here are some customers and their projects:

DHA Suffa University (DSU)

DHA Suffa University (DSU), established in the year 2012, has systematically taken giant strides to become the institution of choice in Pakistan. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs in Engineering, Computer Sciences and Management Sciences.

At DHA Suffa University all business applications have been deployed by either writing code or customizing open-source software where available resulting in nearly zero software cost to DSU. All business applications that have been custom built use the Radicore framework.

At the heart of our IT infrastructure is the DSU Core Business Application (DSU CBA) that has been built using the Radicore platform. We use DSU CBA to maintain all our academic records related to students in digital form. Thus using DSU CBA we are able to generate the transcript of any student who has ever studied at DSU. We also use it to download various other reports such as the Student ID card, plan of study report, merit scholarship report and various other reports. DSU CBA is role based and has roles for Head of Teaching department, Assistant Head of Teaching department, Personal Assistant to Head of teaching Department, Faculty members, Controller of Examinations, Registrar's office and a few others. There are various users defined in the system for each of these roles. All users are authenticated via LDAP and authorized through Radicore. Each user is allocated a defined set of tasks based on their role. Thus at the beginning of each academic session all courses must be instantiated against that academic session. Data is then exported from DSU CBA and imported into our Moodle based DSU Learning Management System. This data includes course meta-data as well as faculty assigned to each course and the list of students enrolled in these courses. In the middle and end of each semester this data is also exported (from DSU CBA) to our DSU Survey system in order to collect feedback from students on the specific set of teachers teaching them in the given semester.

DSU CBA and other Radicore based applications are now a prerequisite for the functioning of all teaching departments and the examination, registration, admissions, QEC and finance departments.

It would be correct to say that Radicore has significantly facilitated us and enabled us to set-up our IT infrastructure at a very low cost and in a short span of time.

Further information can be found in the following blog posts:

Geoprise Technologies

Founded in 1999, Geoprise Technologies focuses exclusively on delivering top-quality expertise and technology solutions for businesses operating in Asia and the Pacific Rim, Europe and North America. From its offices in the United States and Thailand, the firm concentrates its expertise in two practice areas, strategy and operations and information technology, while maintaining strict independence from other professional firms and technology providers.

A collaborative Project Manager application was required that enables Geoprise and its clients to securely share, review and update project plans, status, deliverables, issues and project documentation over the Web in situations when project team members are located all over the world. The initial Project Manager deployment supports a Geoprise engagement for an Aerospace and Defence client having Steering Committee members and project resources spanning 13 time zones with personnel situated in Denmark, Dubai, India, Singapore, Thailand and the United States. Radicore was the framework of choice for developing the Project Manager application because it is a native enterprise-class Web application providing built-in security and role-based access controls, collaboration tools (To-Do lists, Message of the Day and workflow capabilities), virtual private database (allowing the application to securely support multiple client engagements in the future), multiple time zone support and multi-language support. In addition, the Radicore application development framework itself allowed Geoprise to build and deploy the entire Project Manager application rapidly and very cost-effectively.

Photo Democracy

Photo Democracy is s sister company of Chris Beetles Fine Photography, a leading London photographic gallery with premises in Mayfair. Its aim is to sell quality prints from the best artists at an affordable price. Each print is from a limited edition, numbered and signed by the artist, and provided in any one of four sizes on museum quality photographic paper.

As well as selling prints to customers the company also offers budding photographers a channel through which they can sell their art. The ability to show available photographs on the web can reach a far wider audience and be more cost-effective than hiring display space in a studio or gallery.

After capturing the order the TRANSIX application sends a purchase order to the print shop with the relevant print number. The photograph is then printed and despatched direct to the customer. When a photograph's print run has been exhausted it is removed from the website. A monthly run will identify sales by artist, deduct a small commission charge, then reimburse the artist.

BabyBox London

BabyBox is a small family-run company which was created to make it easier for friends or relations to purchase clothes and toys for new-born babies as well as beauty products for mothers. These can either be purchased as individual items or as collections in gift boxes, with the contents of the boxes being customisable. The site was set up so that items could be purchased online and then sent direct to the mother with a custom message.

The TRANSIX application dealt easily with the fact that baby goods are subject to zero rate VAT while beauty products are subject to the standard rate as the standard processing of sales order and invoices allows for any number of surcharges and discounts.

SoftElephant.com

SoftElephant.com is a software house specialising in bespoke solutions for various clients. It was was contracted to create the platform for The Humanus Initiative (www.humanusinitiative.com) that would act as a customer facing portal where administrative staff could verify participant applications and donations.

The Humanus Initiative is on a quest to deploy Waste For Energy facilities capable of recycling 100% of the garbage being generated in the world today. Through these efforts they plan to help restore financial stability for individuals, families and businesses that are facing difficult financial challenges. The foundation needs to reach a minimum of 65,000 participant to donate towards the project for it be successful. When dealing with participant applications in the tens of thousands an administrative platform needs to support those efforts.

Radicore was the preferred platform because of it's advanced menu access control structure, ability to internationalize presentation screens, and it's auditing functionality. With a stable framework in place features could be developed in a step wise fashion without breaking the administrative platform. Security was enhanced to create silos of information where individual administrators could not see other administrators participant applications. Integration with automatic email systems and online fax processing created a platform that allows administrators full access to relevant information while limit the number of clicks to process a participant application.

The web based application has proven to be a success while processing participant applications in a secure and reliable environment that is open to easy expansion as future needs arise.

Wedding Rings Direct

Following on from the success with the Blackwoods project Agreeable Notion Ltd turned again to Radicore for an upgrade to a second client's back office system. This client was Wedding Rings Direct who sell custom jewellery to members of the public. As this client's needs were more extensive it was felt that a bespoke solution would be far too expensive, so they asked Radicore to build a general-purpose package which could be used by any number of clients in a wide variety of industries. Radicore rose to the challenge and started building this application in January 2007. It was based on the database designs found in the Data Model Resource Book written by Len Silverston.

The first version of this application, which was given the name TRANSIX, was available for demonstration in July 2007. It contained implementations of the PARTY, PRODUCT, ORDER, INVENTORY, INVOICE and SHIPMENT databases as separate subsystems, each with their own sets of user transactions (tasks). The next ten months were spent doing the following:

  • Migrating data from the old database to the new TRANSIX databases.
  • Modifying the front-end website so that it used the new database.
  • Adding additional functionality to the front-end website, such as a Customer Portal.
  • Enhancing the capabilities of the back-end TRANSIX application.

Anyone who has ever written a software package which can be used by numerous organisations will quickly tell you that each organisation will want customisations that are unique to them and which would be difficult to build into the standard package as this would make them available to everybody. This situation was remedied by enhancing the RADICORE framework to look for each client's customisations in a separate subdirectory. This meant that all customisations were kept separate from the core code, and each client's customisations were held in a separate subdirectory. These customisations could be as simple as a change to a screen or report layout, or changes to program logic which could either be run as well as or instead of the standard code.

After extensive testing of the modified front-end website and the new back-end TRANSIX application the new software went live in May 2008. Within 3 years they had tripled their turnover to £2.5m without adding to their cost base. The use of the Customer Portal and the sending of automatic emails whenever the status of a customer's order was changed greatly reduced the pressure on their Customer Services department. The multi-currency and multi-lingual capabilities of TRANSIX allowed this company to open up additional websites in other countries - USA, Germany and Sweden. The front-ends are all on different servers, but they all use the same databases on the UK server.

Both the RADICORE framework and the TRANSIX application have been subject to continual enhancement since its original implementation. Among the enhancements have been the following:

  • The ability for a customer to purchase a sample of a product at a nominal price, and provided that the customer purchased the product within a certain limit the quoted price was held instead of being recalculated at the current rates.
  • The ability to convert sales orders into invoices which could be turned into PDF documents and emailed to the customer.
  • The ability to book returned goods into inventory so that they could appear in a new "Special Offers" section of the front-end website where they could be sold at a discount.
  • The ability to send and receive emails from the application instead of using a separate email client.
  • The ability to create purchase orders from sales orders so that products could be obtained from their network of suppliers.
  • The ability for suppliers to manage their orders through a Supplier Portal.
  • The ability to record any number of discount codes which could either be limited by date or by number, with the discount being expressed either as a fixed amount or a percentage of the order total. These discount codes could be used by any customer on any order, and were separate from the discount used in the Special Offers section.
  • The addition of a REQUEST subsystem to handle requirements, requests and quotations.
  • The addition of a WORK-EFFORT subsystem to handle timesheets, expenses and holidays.
  • The addition of a CONTENT subsystem to handle the content for static pages.
  • The addition of web services so that the front-end and back-end applications could be situated on different servers.

SoftElephant.com

SoftElephant.com is a software house specialising in bespoke solutions for various clients. When asked to provide a Mutual Fund Management system as a web application they realised that by using a suitable framework they could reduce development times and thus provide a more cost-effective solution for their client. They found such a framework in Radicore which meant that they could concentrate their efforts on the business rules and not have to spend too much time on the presentation and data access layers. Having designed a properly normalised database it was a simple process to import that database structure into Radicore's data dictionary, generate the table classes, then use the forms generation feature, which is based on transaction patterns, to generate the forms to maintain the contents of those database tables. The PDF generation feature is used to create statements, which are then e-mailed to the specified recipients.

Blackwoods Distillers

Blackwood's Distillers is the UK's newest distillery and Shetland's first. The small but popular company is growing rapidly as it attracts consumers from around the world. The company found itself with an inadequate logistics and distribution system that was beginning to affect customer care. A new system had to be implemented rapidly and cost effectively. Faced with such a tight development time line, Agreeable Notion Ltd turned to the Radicore Software Limited for both its development environment and its application development expertise. Guided by Agreeable Notion we built a bespoke Logistics and Distribution system with reliable and predictable results. The project was a resounding success. Blackwood's have since been so encouraged with the results that they are extending the project to cover production, inventory control as well as some consumer side e-commerce.

Blackwood has subsequently been acquired by Distil plc (AIM: DIS) in London, UK, which owns drinks brands in a number of sectors of the alcoholic drinks market, and markets and sells its brands in a number of international markets including the UK, USA, Germany, Spain, Australia and Russia.