SGI Compliance: How continuity creates value

Werkplanner is an administration tool that helps with the reporting of asbestos remediation. It keeps track of how a company will clean up the asbestos, who will do it, how long that person has been working on it and even what time her shift started. A report then rolls out which is kept for 15 years.

As with so many applications, Werkplanner was originally developed by freelancers. Every time something had to be added or adjusted, someone was hired for that purpose. Suppose you normally work with two freelancers and one of the two becomes ill, then you have to look for another one. If a piece of software has been around for ten years, there have often been several different people who have made adjustments. If several independent people work on an application separately from each other, this is often at the expense of stability in the long term. SGI Compliance wanted to guarantee the continuity of the development of Werkplanner and therefore decided to work with us. By using an agency like 10KB, you guarantee a number of advantages. We put several people on a job, sometimes for more hours in the month, sometimes for fewer hours in the month. The big advantage is that the knowledge is always preserved and there is always someone who can jump in quickly if necessary. This is advantageous, for example, when an external API changes its software. We can then act on this quickly, so that the software is always up to date. By dividing the knowledge among several people (and taking on the knowledge transfer internally), SGI Compliance is always assured of an application that can be updated monthly and we take responsibility for support if something goes wrong.

Werkplanner was an existing application that had to remain available for clients during our developments. We have therefore done our best to implement new features as quickly as possible, so that Werkplanner customers can use them straight away. One of the ways in which we accelerate the time to market of (updates of) applications is by using Review Apps.

SGI Compliance does not have its own developers for this application. As a result, we also partly fulfill a consultancy role. What needs to be built? What do you need for that? What is useful for the future? Originally, Werkplanner could only be used for asbestos related projects, but SGI Compliance does much more than that. It would be great if they could use this software for multiple types of projects. Because we think about the future-proofing of software and expansion possibilities, we have tackled the foundation of the software. By tackling that basis and putting something there that works, we can use that code for other markets. It is now also possible to use Werkplanner for demolition projects and adding other types of projects is a breeze. This of course drastically increases the possible market for the software and makes the investment of modifying the entire foundation of the software worthwhile

The first thing we bring to the table for our clients is technical knowledge. We know exactly which things might be technically possible and are therefore happy to think along with them for the future. We know what is technically easy to implement and which things are more difficult. In addition, we have customers in many different industries. This allows us to bring knowledge from other industries to your company. So in addition to working on code, we are also an IT partner and we like to add a bit of consultancy. We like to go further than just the technology and also think along with a part of the business. For example, we were developing new features for Werkplanner that were added for free for their customers. We then advised SGI Compliance to start using Feature Flags. With Feature Flags you can charge extra money for extra functionalities. You can also turn features on or off for certain customer groups to test new functionalities. At Werkplanner, feature flags are used as a module system. This way customers can have extra paid modules for extra functionalities.

At the end of the day, every company we work with owes a lot of business to their software. Our long-term goal is always to make sure our customers are successful with the software we make for them.