Forrester has cited the migration to digital business as one of the most critical priorities for business leaders this year, with the pandemic having been a key driver of rapid transformation. Netcall has celebrated that innovation, and the achievements of its customers over the last 12 months, by announcing DI BLUE, a global software consultancy firm, as the winner of its Liberty Create 2021 App of the Year Award for the development of its My.FirstClimate app.
Developed for First Climate, and using Netcall’s low-code development platform, Liberty Create, the app will be pivotal in assisting private and public sector organisations in achieving their sustainability objectives and attaining carbon neutrality. Using the My.FirstClimate app, customers can calculate their carbon footprint, reduce their future emissions and offset any remaining emissions. The app also features a complete backend solution for First Climate, enabling customer registration, case processing, invoice creation and much more.
The app is a unique end-to-end solution made up of a combination of a CRM, portal and e-commerce site. DI BLUE recognised that with low-code, it could build each element to work together natively, and by using the Liberty Create platform, built an Amazon-like catalogue and checkout functionality as well as integrations to external calculation engines. Now, given the flexibility of low-code, DI BLUE has gained the ability to not only deliver the functionality to their exact requirements, but also to evolve the app over time to meet their customer’s future needs.
Niek De Visscher, CEO at DI BLUE, commented, “We are thrilled to have been awarded the 2021 App of the Year for My.FirstClimate. We chose Liberty Create over an off-the-shelf e-commerce tool, and it really is proving to be the next-gen low-code platform we were searching for. It’s much more than low-code; it enables businesses to build a connected, fast and agile digital platform that helps companies to scale, innovate and deliver a top-tier user experience. The application lifecycle management and the collaboration with the product team allow us to detect and resolve issues in a matter of hours or days, both in our application and in Liberty Create itself. We couldn’t be more pleased with our first app on the platform.”
The other 2021 finalists – and worthy runners up – for the award were Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust, for its mass COVID-19 testing app, and Cumbria County Council, for its highways app. Winner of the awards in 2020, Cumbria County Council has continued its innovation journey, using low-code to rapidly create 16 different systems over the last 12 months. The digital team has developed a highways management system that can triage, validate and case manage work requests whilst transforming accuracy of location identification. Finding issues based on postcodes or street names had previously been extremely time intensive, but by integrating What3Words (which divides the globe into 3m x 3m squares each tied to a unique 3-word address) into location reporting, the onsite highways team is now able to pinpoint the exact location of these issues quickly – . Overall, improved data quality, signposting and case management has seen highways managers free up eight hours per week.
The mass COVID-19 testing app, created by the Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust (RCHT), was another great example of how low-code accelerates app development times. After being chosen as a phase 2 trial site for Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) testing last year, the trust needed to rapidly build a reporting system to capture test results. In just 14 days, by using Netcall’s Liberty Create low-code platform, RCHT was able to create a full working product that now enables employees to self-test and submit results into a secure portal. By providing test results in real-time, the trust has been able to effectively identify and alert those who have needed to self-isolate, supporting contact tracing across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
Richard Billington, Netcall’s Chief Technology Officer, was part of the judging panel and also hosted the virtual awards ceremony. He commented, “It was a pleasure to observe the ingenuity that all three finalists demonstrated with their apps at the awards. Netcall is proud to partner with DI BLUE for its strength to deliver value, a hands-on mentality, its strategy savviness and a total love for technology. Sustainability is extremely important to Netcall, and we are committed to working towards being carbon neutral with an ambition to achieve this by the end of 2026. It has therefore been a pleasure to be involved in a project that echoes these values. DI BLUE blew us away with the scale of its application, depth of functionality and styling of its user interface. I was honoured to showcase it to our audience as it shows the breadth and capability of our Create platform.”
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