Build & Innovate

Bespoke Application Development

Some of the best ideas are built from the ground up. Not everything is available as package software. We help organisations transform those ideas into business reality.

Giving business the edge

Building the latest app and developing the latest product. Whilst there’s always been an argument for buy versus build, there’s not always a package that can meet your needs or maybe you just don’t need all of that functionality and license cost. With the advent of cloud services, it has never been easier to build a minimal viable product or prototype and then evolve based on market or user feedback. Iterations can be down to days and weeks rather than months and years in previous software lifecycles. Be the next Uber or Airbnb and go disrupt!

We can help advise you on the latest software components and the best license model for your business.

eCommerce Design & Development

We help organisations excel online with their digital propositions. Growing revenues and providing delightful digital customer experiences.

Delivering digital change regularly

Due to the complexities and challenges found with existing technologies and integrations, pure agile is something that is normally unachievable whilst at the same time providing rapid change. This is why we’ve developed our own pragmatic approach to agile, allowing clients to integrate important elements of their business processes. Our expert team is still on hand to ensure that everything runs smoothly in the professional way you would expect from a partner, focusing heavily on the delivery of quality software that is able to achieve your business objectives and delight your customers.

The Biggest Risk: Building the Wrong Thing

The biggest risk to a digital business is building the wrong product, this wastes time and money and will lead to your business not achieving success. Unfortunately, in most cases it is unclear what the right product actually is which is why our delivery process addresses these questions before a developer touches a keyboard.

Let SPT Services help you build the Right Thing!

Flexible Development Teams

We put together digital delivery teams so that we can build beautiful experiences for our clients and their customers. We undertake our work using an agile methodology from decades of experience to ensure we build the right solution to achieve your business objectives. We see our delivery approach as ‘our secret sauce’ and what ensures clients trust us time and time again. We’re open minded but prepared to challenge you if we don’t think you’re taking the right approach to achieve your business objectives, something our clients value most about us. Our delivery approach has worked at all sizes of clients and our breadth of industry experience provides us with a unique view of the different complexities and risks you will encounter.

Integration Design & Development

The world is moving to API’s and micro-services to provide more agile applications, using middleware to assist and accelerate Digital Transformation. Sensory events and the IoT (Internet of Things) are gathering pace with new use cases being developed and brought to market every day and being consumed in our homes. It’s not just Uber and Airbnb that are using these.
Where are you on this journey and how do you make use of these messages, data and events to gain insight?

Integrating the Digital World

Whether you are a High Street Retailer, a Retail Bank or operating in the Travel industry we have witnessed some fantastic digital web properties only to be let down by their integration architecture which is akin to string and sellotape. They looked fantastic on the face of it but behind the scenes, it was anything but a smooth running operation. Today given the amount of scrutiny organisations are under with GDPR, regulatory and compliance issues it’s paramount that organisations treat this with the respect it deserves. Having a secure message back-bone that allows trading partners to connect via API’s is no longer expensive and time consuming to implement. Neither is implementing an Application Integration Bus to connect your business systems and processes irrespective of whether they run in the cloud or on-premise. We have deep expertise designing integration architectures and building hooks across cloud and legacy business systems. Our integration approach starts with your business needs, then we work across your current IT infrastructure or make technology recommendations based on your unique requirements. We always focus on ensuring data is kept to the highest standard and moves successfully across your IT landscape and business systems. We can help you modernise your architecture, connect seamlessly to customers and suppliers and where appropriate help you monetise your investment. Our range of services and technologies from key vendors such as IBM and Microsoft can help you get ahead of the game quickly. If you have already made an investment in these technologies we can help you maximise your return from them as well as keep them optimised for peak trading and growth with our services below.

Mobile Design & Development

Mobile only or Mobile first your call?

As we all know, Mobile has made a huge impact to the way we live our lives. This isn’t just with consumers, these same devices are flooding into the workplace and being used with business applications too. From apps, responsive design to the latest frameworks supporting Progressive Web Applications (PWA). At DeeperThanBlue our Mobile-Experience practice has designed and built solutions for consumers, field workers, and knowledge workers which have been used in industries such as Retail, Manufacturing, Wholesale, Distribution, Logistics, as well as Sports & Leisure. Whilst not as pretty as the consumer devices we build solutions for clients on rugged devices that endure and perform in some of the most demanding environments as well as the typical doorstep delivery. We focus on optimising the user experiences and customer engagement. Our solution implementations have increased order value and units sold, removed cost and reduced time on task through redefined business processes, as well as improving asset utilisation.

Business Automation Design & Development

Intelligent process automation – Remove the mundane and concentrate on the higher value processes in the pursuit of digital transformation.

Automating Business

Business Process Automation (BPA) is a process of managing information, data and business processes to reduce costs, resources and investment whilst looking to optimise a business process or processes through technology.

At SPT Serivces our BPA practice specialises in helping organisation combine people, process and technology to improve organisational performance, visibility, product/ service quality and agility of business processes and to facilitate business innovation.

We approach this by reviewing the ‘as-is’ business processes and then design the ‘to-be’ processes. We take an incremental approach which quickly serves as a proof point before expanding and rolling out other processes within the process lifecycle.

The process life cycle spans three steps:

• Model and Simulate
• Deploy, Execute, and Change
• Model, Analyse, Predict, and Act

Successful Business Automation projects normally involve some element of improved integration requirements and middleware solutions.

Business Analytics Design & Development

We use Business Analytics to help your business plan, monitor and perform.
Our solutions help you look forwards not just backwards in the rear view mirror.

We have genuine industry experience

Having held senior management positions in leading organisations, we have faced the problems our customers are facing every day, this gives us a real appreciation of the realities of getting to grips with Business Analytics.

Start where you need to

All businesses are at a different level of maturity with their data, reporting, planning systems and processes. No matter where you are on this journey we are here to help advise and give you the benefit of our experience.

We simply call these stages See, Plan, Predict, Automate.

We provide integrated solutions

Our solutions span a broad range of business processes, not just financials! We analyse your business processes, provide insight to add value, increase efficiency and accuracy. Then, we link these processes together to ensure your departments are ‘working’ together.

Our competencies

We cover the broad range of business analytics software solutions from IBM, including Cognos, Planning Analytics (TM1), SPSS. To compliment these offerings we also work with leading BI solutions from other vendors including Microsoft PowerBI, Qlik Sense, Tableau. Planning applications from Anaplan and Adaptive Insights. Databases we work with include MS SQLServer, Oracle, Teradata, IBM DB2.

Continuous Development & Testing

Delivering quality from a continuous pipeline of development in an agile model is what we are about.

Our mantra is ‘Test Early and Test Often’

Starting the Journey

You may or may not have heard of the mantra ‘Test early, test often’ – it relates to the continuous development process and aids waste reduction when it comes to delivering your development and testing iterations.

Testing early and testing often is something that a lot of companies have not truly embraced yet, but it’s an expensive mistake to make. You will be wasting effort, time and money if you don’t at least try to implement some forms of this early into your delivery processes. As we know, the earlier issues are found, the easier, cheaper and less time consuming they are to resolve.

Static analysis and static testing

Static Analysis is defined by ISTQB as “Analysis of software artifacts, e.g. requirements or code, carried out without execution of these software development artifacts. Static analysis is usually carried out by means of a supporting tool.”

The aim of performing static analysis of a requirement, is to reduce the risk of misinterpretation and look for gaps. We find it useful to draw up a matrix of possible scenarios to test for the requirement and discuss this with the wider team, considering not just what delivering the requirement affects, but areas that the requirement should NOT affect (regression analysis). As the description suggests, there are some tools available on the market to help with code reviews.

Shift left

Wherever possible, start testing on code as soon as it is ready. Moving your testing further left on your project schedule should mean that you find defects, risks and issues earlier in the life-cycle and, consequently, get them rectified or mitigated earlier.

We find it particularly useful to review the Delivery Pipeline (a list of all of the things you do to deliver a change from inception to it being deployed to the Live environment). When reviewing the pipeline, consider where testing tasks are done and if they can be done at an earlier point, as well as looking at introducing new testing types, should you need them.

Bear in mind that the code doesn’t have to be fully ready for you to start proving it. In a company where agile maturity is reasonably advanced, developers will be writing automated unit tests to help do this.

Automation

Automation can come in many forms, in terms of tool options. They can be used at different points during your development and testing cycles. Examples include: SOAP UI for API’s or Web services, J Unit and Cucumber for Unit tests and Selenium for User Interface and browser-based tests. They are each great in their own right, but if used early, can add a great deal of benefit in terms of proving that your code has not been significantly impacted by any new changes.

When automating, look for tests which can be re-run and cover the critical business flows and scenarios.

Bear in mind, with automation, there needs to be a constant focus on the quality of the tests. When tests fail, an investigation needs to be carried out to assess the root cause of the problem (it could be an invalid test step, spurious data or a valid fail which results in a defect being raised).

Often automation is used to execute regression tests towards the end of the development lifecycle, but why not execute it earlier? Arguably, any code which is introduced should fundamentally, not impact any previously delivered functions.If Automation is done early enough, it should make your other types of testing a little easier, less risky and speedier.

Clarity

One of the key successes to any project is clear communication throughout the team. Providing clarity from the outset by determining which methods and how they are used will make the entire project process easier (Jira, Clear Quest, Confluence, Slack).

Clarity of communication will help set expectations, understand progress. In addition to this, as the project gets underway clear communication will facilitate development, mitigate risks of issues being found later and provide transparent information for the wider project team.