Stadler rail needed an easy to use system for keeping track of the running condition, defects and cleanliness of their rolling stock.

Using my OnSight reporting system as a base, I developed a bespoke PWA and SaaS system that allows the client to keep track of all their rolling stock in one digital place. This gives the employees a very user-friendly way to input data as they repair and clean the rolling stock. It gives management a clear overview, along with graphed KPIs and historical tabled data, of the state of each carriage. The system also gives some BI perception of where potential bottlenecks occur over single carriages and the whole stock.

The system is fully responsive and works on all devices, including iOS and Android for the front end reporting and any higher resolution displays for the admin backend. The system has been running for over 3 years now without any hick-ups or complaints and we are excited to further develop it's remit in the future.

View project

I seem to have an X'mas tradition of making some fun little "cracker pull" games for 3 popular restaurants in the Mitchells & Butlers' stable: Toby Carvery, Harvester, and Stonehouse.

Working for the 3rd Christmas in a row with the loverly people at One/Fifty Consultancy to bring a little X'mas cheer to all the customers in the form of a little cracker game that gives them a new restaurant voucher each week and also an unlimited amount of cheesy festive jokes!

As this is the third year running these games (and I love making analytics KPIs) we can get some insight in the user habits when playing the games. Each year the games surpass 2 million vouchers claimed which obviously make the user and the client very happy. I’m not as happy as I can see most people are there for the vouchers and no where near enough come purely for the X’mas jokes! …although I may have skewed the analytics on this one 😉

The games are embedded in the restaurants’ app from where the user gets to play against their friend to win the voucher …or just sneakily play it alone to make sure you get the bonus! I developed the game play, animation and also the backend API that saves which users have won that week to make sure no one gets too greedy.

The game also then jumps off to a holiday competition from Jet2 Holidays and also branded filters for Insta and TikTok.

View project

To help streamline the the day to day business for its employees, Merseyrail tasked me with designing and building an Android app for phonebook look up. There were a few complications to be considered; namely phones don't always have data connections underground where a fair amount of employers are. I solved this problem by running a local couch database on the device. Each month (and first-run) the app checks if it has a data connection and if it does, it will sync with the latest contact data and update it's local database ready for off-line use again. I wrote the API for this and also the backend PHP to query Merseyrail's Active Directory/LDAP employee directory to make sure we had up to date information.

The client also needed bespoke lists of extra contact details beyond the bulk Active Directory numbers, list of station phone numbers, emergency numbers etc. For these I employed a bespoke database for quick access and fed this into the API so all the data came from the single source as far as the app was concerned.

The app utilises 2 factor authentication for added security of the senstive data; utilsing Google Authenticator API as well as generating QR codes for quick scanning. Administering the day-to-day contact details was done via Microsoft Active Directory. But the client needed a bespoke web-based admin interface to curate and update the bespoke lists of contacts. For this I designed and built a the CMS as a single page web app (using mostly HTML5, javascript/jQuery, php & mySQL) with a focus on an easy to use UI to help avoid training costs for the client.

View project